400-level / Advanced Courses

Description: Samuel Johnson (1709-84) is perhaps best known today as a literary critic, as the author of Rasselas, a seminal work in the oriental tradition, and as the compiler of the first major English dictionary: hence his sobriquet, Dictionary Johnson. He was also however, a major theoretician on the art of biography and among its most important practitioners in the eighteenth century. As he wrote to his own biographer, James Boswell (1740-95), shortly after they first met in 1763: “the biographical part of literature is what I love most.”

This course will begin with a study of Johnson’s writings about formal biography and life-writing in general, primarily in his periodical essays of the 1750s: The Rambler and The Idler. We shall then look at his earliest extended biography, The Life of Mr Richard Savage (1744), before turning to the first and most celebrated of Boswell’s many journals: his extraordinary London Journal (1762-63). Our next focus will be on Boswell’s depiction of Johnson in another of his journals, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, which was to some extent a trial run for the biography of Johnson then in progress. We shall then examine some of the remarkable critical biographies collected as Lives of the Poets that Johnson wrote in his final years. His lives of Milton, Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Gray will be among those studied. We shall consider some of the questions about life-writing that Johnson’s biographies raise and that he himself posed in his theoretical essays. How blunt, for example, should a writer of obituaries and epitaphs be about his or her subject? To what extant should a biographer draw on personal knowledge of the subject, and how tendentious should his treatment of the subject be? How large a place should critical analysis play in life writing about a literary figure?

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

Texts:

• James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R.W. Chapman, intro. Pat Rogers. Oxford World’s Classics, 1980.
• -----, London Journal 1762-1763, ed. Gordon Turnbull. Penguin Books, 2010.
• Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. John Mullan. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.
• Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, ed. Jack Lynch and Celia Barnes. Oxford World’s Classics, 2020.

Evaluation: Short paper, 20%; seminar presentation, 20%; participation in class discussion, 20%; term paper, 40%.

Format: Seminar.

Description: The course will examine the novel as a literary form, exploring its emergence, development, and consolidation in South Asia. It will also consider the key formal, aesthetic, and political concerns of these novels, in particular examining how categories such as realism, modernism, and irrealism are signaled in the region. Since South Asia is a multilingual region with robust literary traditions in several of the local languages, we will read South Asian novels in translation in addition to English. The course, in addition, will also introduce students to intellectual concerns and theoretical debates of the field of World Literature.

Texts:

• Bankim Chatterjee – The Sacred Brotherhood (1882) [Library e-book available]
• Rabindranath Tagore – Home and the World (1915)
• RK Narayan – Guide (1958)
• Kiran Desai – Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard (1998)
• Aravind Adiga – The White Tiger (2008)

This is an indicative list and course texts will be finalized later.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and TA conferences.

Prerequisite: No formal prerequisite. Because substantial attention will be paid to poetic and fictional form and style, however, this advanced course’s interests and discussions will be directed chiefly to English majors who have completed their required Poetics course. The professor’s training, approaches, and tastes are literary and will necessarily guide discussions, but the expertise of students in other disciplines will be needed as we also work to understand the literary Cohen as a cultural, historical, and musical phenomenon. This course is not open to U1 students. Students should consult the instructor at the email address above for permission to register.

All students wishing to take this course must attend the first class, even if they have not yet been able to register.

Description: Leonard Cohen’s death, announced to the public one day before the election of Donald Trump to the United States Presidency, and following closely on his acclaimed last album You Want It Darker, not to mention his published letter to former lover Marianne Ihlen after her death, which casually predicted the nearness of his own, struck many fans as the final act of consummate grace in a career full of exceptional showmanship and exceptional pursuits of authenticity. Many felt that an essential presence had gone from their lives upon hearing the news. While such emotions are not the stuff of criticism, they might well prompt it; and they are particularly compelling because they imply in each audience member, and in his audience as a whole, a certain reading of Cohen and his works that can be studied, discussed, and written about. If for instance you accepted without qualms my paralleling of the superficially opposite terms “showmanship” and “authenticity” above, you’re probably a Cohen fan, actual or potential. That’s a reading of Cohen on your part, one that we will find to be consonant with deep themes and concerns in his complete works.

In this course we will read and listen to as many of the works of Leonard Cohen as time permits, with an emphasis on the period up to and including The Future (1992) but also reaching for his last album in his lifetime, You Want It Darker (2016). From seductive song lyrics to the most scandalously hilarious novel, brutal poems, and moving prayers yet published in Canada, Cohen’s work demands and rewards scrupulous reading, and the bulk of course time will be given to our discussion of its developing vision and technique. This close reading work will help us to separate Cohen as a writer from the “Leonard Cohen” cultural phenomenon, an important critical task. At the same time, we will hope to chart some of the history of that phenomenon, from its emergence after 1961’s Spice Box of Earth, his attainment of international celebrity after he turned to performance and recording in 1967, its severe waning through the 1970s and early 1980s, its resurgence and reformation after I’m Your Man in 1988, and its global expansion after the tours of 2008. We will try to get at the phenomenon’s premises and machinery by looking at reviews, interviews, and documentaries, and we will read the biographies (Nadel or Simmons) for a glimpse of Cohen’s experience and manipulation of it. Lecture and discussion will attempt to situate the periods of Cohen’s work and of his fame in relation to relevant cultural contexts: Beat writing; the poetry of A.M. Klein, Irving Layton, and Michael Ondaatje; the Cold War; cultural representations of the Holocaust; the 1960s and their meanings and outcomes; modernism and post-modernism; the crisis of faith in modernity; neo-conservatism in the 1980s; celebrity and fandom. The professor is certainly not expert in all these areas, so students’ ideas, knowledge, and experience will be essential to the course’s success.

One trigger alert: there will be no further trigger alerts in this course. Cohen’s writing is often scandalous, sometimes deliberately so, sometimes unthinkingly. Images of violence and death, sometimes misogynistic, sometimes in a Holocaust context, are constant in the earlier works, and they can be treated by the author and his personae with an unremitting indifference, even hilarity. Students who “love Leonard Cohen” when they enter the course are often shocked to find some of his works deeply ethically disturbing. I am interested in the terrain between ethical questions and literary experience and always encourage their consideration in my classroom. I am aware that some students may have suffered trauma akin to those depicted by Cohen and will find such readings profoundly troubling. I do my best to respect their experience as readers, but I will not do so by trying to deflect in advance a given work’s content or the ethics of its treatment.

Texts:

• Cohen, Leonard. Beautiful Losers. 1966. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991.
• ---. The Favourite Game. 1964. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994.
• ---. Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1994.

Evaluation (subject to change: these were the requirements in 2020):

• A short report on a field of cultural history relevant to Cohen’s career, to be distributed to your classmates, 3 pp. + 2 pp. bibliography. 20%;
• An assignment on the production of Cohen’s celebrity in various media, 5 pp. 20%;
• A major research paper (12-15 pp.). 50%;
• Participation in discussions. 10%. If you have not taken a course with Professor Trehearne before, please note the following: perfect attendance is expected, and absences will be noted, but this part of your mark assesses active, useful participation in discussion and not attendance. Full attendance through the semester without speaking will earn 0/10. Do not take this class if you are not a comfortable participant in class discussions.

Format: ​Lecture and discussion.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university courses in English literature.

Description: Alice Munro deserves her reputation as one of Canada’s great writers. Through ordinary settings, realistic characters, and an accessible prose style, she nevertheless conveys insights that arrive with the force of shock. Her chosen genre, the short story, is now connected to her name perhaps as much as to James Joyce’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s. In this course we will become Munro scholars, reading across the arc of her oeuvre from her first pieces published in Canadian magazines in the 1950s to her most recent collections. The work of the course will consist, first, in interpreting her brilliant stories one at a time; second, in tracing the shape of her career, which took a decisive turn in 1976 when The New Yorker began publishing her work; and third, in positioning her writing in relation to larger patterns, including regionalism, the Gothic, Canadian literature, feminism, modernism, and postmodernism. In 2009 Alice Munro was awarded the Man Booker International Prize; in 2013 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We will follow the juries in compassing her lifetime achievement.

Texts:

• Dance of the Happy Shades
• Lives of Girls and Women
• Who Do You Think You Are?
• The Progress of Love
• Friend of My Youth
• The Love of a Good Woman
• Runaway

Evaluation: Oral presentation; short essay; research paper; participation

Format: ​Lectures, oral presentations, discussion.

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

Description: Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood share a closely aligned space in terms of Canadian literary history. Although Atwood began to publish her work almost a decade earlier than Ondaatje, both writers came of professional age during a period marked by profound changes in the Canadian literary landscape. Atwood’s poetry, fiction, and literary criticism transformed the way Canadians understood their national literature. Her work introduced a new set of values that challenged existing norms and set the stage for the arrival of new wave feminism in Canada. At the same time, Atwood was breaking down conventional notions of history, undermining ideas about literary canons, and critiquing received assumptions about sexual norms. Meanwhile, Ondaatje was importing some of the haunting exoticism associated with his childhood years in Sri Lanka. His Canadian poems were set in strange jungles. They explored bizarre transformations and imaginative realms. He liked characters who were “sane assassins” and he insisted that “My mind is pouring chaos / in nets onto the page.” Both authors are drawn to difference, eccentricity, lawlessness, madness. Their characters fall off the map. Like Atwood, Ondaatje wants to revise history, undermine the way we see space, and challenge the status quo when it comes to representing memory, eroticism, desire. But above all, both authors redefine the nature of creativity. What does Ondaatje mean when he asks: “Why do I love most / among my heroes those / who sail to that perfect edge / where there is no social fuel”? We will find out. How could Atwood write a poem called “This Is a Photograph of Me,” only to reveal that it “was taken / the day after I drowned”? How can she be writing the poem if she is dead? There are some interesting solutions to this mystery. But the poems are more than mysterious. In following the poetic careers of these two eminent writers, we will explore our own understanding of the nature of the creative act. Along the way, we will meet murderers, dreamers, executioners, madmen, seducers, deviants, and a host of others who are prepared to challenge us at every turn. This will not be innocent. It will not be easy. The first half of the course will be devoted to Ondaatje’s poetry; the second half will focus on Atwood’s. Students should be prepared to write on a weekly basis, in order to facilitate their inevitable self-transformation.

Texts:

• Atwood, Margaret. Eating Fire: Selected Poetry 1965-1995.
• Ondaatje, Michael. Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems.

Note: Students registered for this course should obtain the two required texts well in advance of the course. These texts are only available online and from used booksellers.

Evaluation (Tentative): A series of short, weekly online journal entries (40%); two short essays (40%); participation (10%); attendance (10%).

Format: Seminar.

Description: Located at an early twentieth-century moment of major innovation for anglophone poetry, this course engages the contributions of women poets to the making of what came to be known as “modern poetry,” whose literary and conceptual experiments would exert major impact on twentieth-century culture, and whose legacy is still felt today. The premise for the course is that these poets regarded poetry as a language for art, critique, and invention– a language in which to engage in literary experiment, comment on the conditions and challenges of their “modern” times, and imagine new futures for modern individuals and cultures.

Until the 1980s, the canon associated with modern poetry in English, established by mid-twentieth-century critical work, was assumed to consist of the work of major male figures such as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Yet as this course addresses, between 1900 and 1960, many women were actively engaged in the effort to revolutionize anglophone poetry: within early twentieth-century literary circles, their work was recognized and respected, and they fulfilled pivotal cultural roles. This course focuses on the women that Bonnie Kime Scott calls in The Gender of Modernism the “forgotten and silenced makers” of modern poetry. The 1990s brought their work to attention, but recent commentary by Cassandra Laity and others suggests that we are again at a cultural moment of needing to renew awareness of their work.

Their work allows us into the world of experimental modern literature, which exerted a major influence on the subsequent development of anglophone literature, from the vantage of those women seeking to develop such vanguard art during a period when women still faced considerable resistance to their contributions as “makers” – when they were still more often regarded as muses than artists, when it was still often assumed that, as Virginia Woolf registers in To the Lighthouse, “women can’t paint, women can’t write.” We explore language and literature from the cultural archives for engaging the art, critical thought and experience of artists often marginalized and subordinated by the dominant culture of their contexts.

We engage work of pioneering “first-generation” modern poets such as H.D., Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein; poets associated with the 1920s such as Anne Spencer and Edna St. Vincent Millay; and those emerging in the later years of modern poetry such as Muriel Rukeyser, P.K. Page, and Elizabeth Bishop. We consider cultural contexts for their work such as the Imagist movement in poetry, Italian Futurism, conditions of the First and Second World Wars, early 20C feminist and queer cultural work, the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age, and Canadian modernism.

In addition to reckoning closely with their poetry, which often involves the many forms of “difficulty” associated with modern poetry, we also engage from a literary-historical angle these writers’ contributions—H.D.’s vital role in the formation of the poetic movement of “Imagism,” as well as her influential critical engagements with the literature of Ancient Greece; Mina Loy’s groundbreaking work with page-space and the genre of the manifesto; Marianne Moore’s syllabic verse; and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s pathfinding modern revisions of the sonnet.

Their poetry often critiques both literary and cultural phenomena of their time and “thinks in verse” about how to move beyond received gender roles of their time toward new possibilities and opportunities. We will also consider how these poets engaged the feminist thought of their time, often as mediated by the early twentieth-century concept of the “New Woman.”

Texts: Poetry will include work by Elizabeth Bishop, H.D., Dorothy Livesay, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, P.K. Page, Muriel Rukeyser, Stevie Smith, Anne Spencer, and Gertrude Stein; we will also consider work by E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and W.B. Yeats.

Evaluation: Brief essay (5 pp.) (30%); longer essay (7-8 pp.) (35%); fictional auto/biography (4 pp.) (20%); attendance and participation (includes journal entries) (15%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: Since the publication of his first novel more than twenty years ago, Colson Whitehead has become one of the most lauded, prized, taught, and studied American novelists writing today. Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” grant and the nearly-as-lucrative honor of Oprah’s Book Club, and the most contemporary novelist included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Whitehead stands at the very center of the contemporary canon. According to critics and scholars alike, part of what makes Whitehead so singular is his ability to write across a vast array of literary and mass-cultural forms: detective and encyclopedic fiction (The Intuitionist [1999], John Henry Days [2001]), contemporary satire and the bildungsroman (Apex Hides the Hurt [2006], Sag Harbor [2009]), and more recently, zombie fiction and the meta-slave narrative (Zone One [2011], The Underground Railroad [2016]).

While Whitehead’s career represents a veritable catalog of genres, it also chronicles nearly two hundred years of American history. If we rearrange his novels not by publication date but loosely by their historical settings, we end up following Whitehead from the slave narrative and folklore of the nineteenth century, to the hard-boiled, civil-rights noir and ethnic bildungsroman of the mid- and late twentieth century, to a kind of postapocalyptic history of the early twenty-first. From this vantage, it seems clear that Whitehead is not only a writer of genre fiction but a prolific writer of one genre in particular: historical fiction.

Students in this course will investigate the trajectory of Whitehead’s body of work as well as how his oeuvre indexes contemporary issues of Black literary production, historical memory, and canon formation. Over the course of the semester, we will study all of Whitehead’s published novels, including Harlem Shuffle, which we will read “hot off the presses” when it is released in September.

Texts:

• The Intuitionist (1999)
• John Henry Days (2001)
• Apex Hides the Hurt (2006)
• Sag Harbor (2009)
• Zone One (2011)
• The Underground Railroad (2016)
• The Nickel Boys (2019)
• Harlem Shuffle (2021)

Evaluation (tentative): Participation (10%); Research Presentation (20%); Conference Paper (30%); Final Paper (40%).

Format: Seminar.

Description: The multi-billion-dollar self-transformation industry promises to create “a new you” and also to make you into the person you were always meant to be. That is straight out of Oprah Winfrey. If Oprah is the leading proponent of the modern ideal of self-transformation, then Shakespeare is the progenitor as well as a key critic of transformational modernity. In this course, we study how Shakespeare became the supreme artist of transformation, and we consider how transformation has become an ideal of modern life.

We will develop a taxonomy of transformation (e.g., metamorphosis, conversion, metanoia, translation, transversion, kenosis, revolution); we’ll read a number of Western transformational artists and/or thinkers about transformation, including Plato, Paul, Ovid, Augustine, John Donne, and John Lyly. From start to finish, our main focus is on six plays by Shakespeare.

The course will feature student presentations on all the plays and all the key issues in the course. You will sign up to create one five-minute powerpoint presentation on a topic you will choose from a list of topics.

Texts: (Shakespeare texts will be available either at Paragraph books or online. Lyly’s play is available online. All other readings will be provided on myCourses.)

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland
• Henry IV, Part One, ed. David Bevington
• Much Ado about Nothing, ed. Sheldon Zitner
• Twelfth Night, ed. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells
• Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill
• The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel
• John Lyly, Galatea

https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Gal_M/complete/index.html

Evaluation:

• Journal: 35%
• Presentation: 15%
• Participation: 15%
• Course paper: 35%

Journal: Your journal is, first of all, for you to do some thinking by writing at each step of the course. But it is also something you do for marks, so you have to write at least a page (about 350 words) about each week’s readings (and our discussions of the readings). It certainly doesn’t have to be formal like an essay. After all, it mostly for you and about your thinking, questioning, arguing. But it’s also going to be read by me, so make it reader-friendly.

Presentation: You will produce a five-minute presentation on the topic you sign up for. You are allowed three slides. This part of the course is based on the three-minute thesis program, where graduate students compete for prizes in recognition of the clarity, succinctness, value, and appeal of their research. We’ll take the competition out of what we do, but leave in the emphasis on clear, succinct, and engaging accounts of valuable research. We’ll do prep work in advance of the first set of presentations.

Course Paper: If you want, you can develop your course paper from the work you will have done for your five-minute presentation. Or, if you prefer, you can choose one of the paper topics I will prepare. In either case, your work will need to take account of some of the most important research on the question or argument you’re developing. What you write does not have to be original work, in the sense that it does not have to be an idea or a view that no one has thought of before. But it does have to be work that you care about, have thought a good deal about, and are keen to share with others. So you could write about, say, Antony and Cleopatra as a rethinking of the sexuality of the self, which is not a new idea, but you could do that with new evidence, with thinking that takes previous work further than it was willing or able to go, and with a conclusion that might shift the perspective from which we see the relationship among theatrical art, sexuality and selfhood in Shakespeare’s time.

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

Description: Spenser’s richly imaginative Faerie Queene is one of the single most widely influential texts in English literature, and constitutes a literary education in itself, since it critically surveys the resources of western culture–including literature, mythology, iconography, philosophy, and theology--up to its point. While having major socio-political investments, this romantic epic is nonetheless a central exemplar of literary fantasy, romance, and allegory. This course would especially complement study of early modern literature and culture, and particular writers of the period such as Shakespeare and Milton, but would also facilitate study of any literary periods in which Spenser strongly influenced writers, readers, and critics, as he did from around 1580 to 1900. Knowledge of The Faerie Queene thus provides a highly valuable basis for any literary studies within that broad expanse of time. Yet allusions to and borrowings from this poet quite widely appear in twentieth-century literature too. He is one of the great fantasists, and would appeal much to anyone interested in such writings and their development. His poetry is also important for the history of epic, for the history of the sublime in literature in the English language, and for the so-called “line of vision” therein: writers who claim some powers of special insight, such as Milton, Blake, Yeats, Eliot, and Wallace Stevens.

Texts:

• The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2nd Longmans edition, paperback
• Course Reader

(Hamilton edition available at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street.)

Evaluation: 4 brief in-class quizzes of 10% each; term paper 50%; class attendance and participation 10%.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Suggested preparation: At least one 300-level course in English; and some previous work with poetry.

Description: This course re-reads the movement of “Modernism”—designating the wave of experimental literary and artistic work in English of 1900-1950—through the work of two prominent writers of the time, poets Marianne Moore and Hilda Doolittle (“H.D.”) Although the “major modernist authors” of modernism who come to mind first are still often figures such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and W.B. Yeats, this course shifts the viewfinder to spotlight the avant-garde work of two female writers equally acclaimed in their time as their male counterparts, respected by Pound, Eliot, Williams, and others; yet then downplayed in critical “canons” of modernism by the mid-twentieth century: as Kime Scott notes in The Gender of Modernism, Moore and H.D. are among the forgotten “makers of modernism.” Engaging and re-thinking “Modernism” through the work of Moore, H.D., and their extensive network of contemporaries affords new perspectives on the nature of the literary and cultural work generated by modernism. We focus especially on Moore’s and H.D.’s critical work (and play) with the concept of “culture”—much contested during the modernist period.

In an era when women were still often positioned as muses for male artists, H.D. and Marianne Moore sought to write and live as “New Women”: their work provides a window on feminist cultural work of their time. At an early 20C moment when women were battling for the vote, access to higher education, and entry into professional life, H.D. and Moore sought, to adapt Sara Ahmed’s concepts, to pursue feminist lives and rethink gender. They were also radical innovators in literature. Toward her pioneering work of Imagism in poetry, H.D. engaged and translated the literature of ancient Greece, from Sappho and Homer to Euripides, toward developing meditations on gender, queer desire and cultural trauma. Working with Freud, H.D. later re-made the concepts of psychoanalysis toward the visionary work of her late career. As part of a circle of avant-garde filmmakers, she contributed to the making of experimental films such as Borderline, with Paul Robeson. Moore, meanwhile, drew upon scientific, historical, and religious thinkers, a host of popular magazines and cultural “finds” from museums, zoos, and bazaars, curating intricately allusive poems that circumvented traditional meter in favour of her own invented syllabic metrics. Like H.D., she dialogued with other contemporaries such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Elizabeth Bishop with her own experiments in art. Some of Moore’s verse reads as the work of a collector-poet using cultural “finds” to comment on her time; some turns to the natural world with an appreciative, even ecocritical eye. She often conceptualized poetry as criticism—involving acts of attention, appreciation, wit, and critique.

Adapting an idea from Cristanne Miller, this course pursues how H.D. and Moore as thinkers grappled with and commented on “questions of authority,” seeking to interrogate and move beyond expectations for female artists, and women, of their time; and developing feminist strategies by way of their engagements with “culture.” We follow their commentary on dominant cultural issues of their early twentieth-century moment: how to navigate conditions of “modernity”; how to engage issues of gender, queerness, and race; how to survive and think about war; how to think about intimacy, marriage, and family; how to find a “room of one’s own”; how to rethink the divide between human and non-human; and how to access and engage the “cultural archives” of the past toward new forms of knowledge.

Texts: Poetry and prose by Moore and H.D., including H.D., Collected Poems, Moore, New Collected Poems (Cass White); H.D., HERmione and Bid Me to Live, Moore, Collected Essays; film essays by H.D., readings by modernist colleagues such as Elizabeth Bishop, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats.

Evaluation: Brief critical essays; final essay; fictional (auto)biography; participation.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous coursework in American Literature before 1900, or in 19th-century British fiction, or permission of instructor. (This course is designed as a participatory seminar for advanced students of literature—often for English majors in their final year.)

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

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

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

Evaluation (tentative): Participation in class discussions, 10%; series of one-page textual analyses, 20%; two critical essays, 20% each (or one extended research paper, 40%); take-home final exam, 30%.

Format: Seminar discussion.

Description: This seminar analyzes a range of English, French, and Irish writings from the long nineteenth century to provide insight into a number of major literary developments across the period’s prose fiction. This particular syllabus allows us to intensively explore literatures of revolution, innovations in feminist and queer literature, the origins of gothic and science fiction, the rise of nineteenth-century children’s literature, the persistence of the ghost story, the emergence of the modern fantastic tale, the return to romance, aspects of literary Darwinism, and the aesthetic and decadent turns of the fin de siècle.

Our study of nineteenth-century British literature and culture will focus on several literal and figurative forms of reproduction (and its discontents): maternity, paternity, doubles/mirrors, and doppelgängers; self-production, parthenogenesis, hauntings, and forgeries; industrialism, evolution, eugenics, and monstrosity.

This syllabus therefore neither follows a strict chronological nor historical narrative; we will not proceed from beginning to middle to end. Instead, we will examine related clusters of development within long nineteenth-century literature and culture. As a result of this seminar’s emphasis on important constellations of forms and thought, certain historical, formal, and cultural topics will recur in our reading: representations of war and imperial violence; transformations of genres and narrative styles; transnational migrations; representations of natural selection and alternative ecologies; vacillations between faith and doubt; romantic representations of exploration and adventure; authorial negotiations of posterity; meditations on mechanism and machine; critiques of tradition and innovation; and depictions of emotional and sexual intimacy.

Texts:

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) and selected short stories
• Jane Webb (Loudon), selections from The Mummy!: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century
• Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
• Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
• Sheridan Le Fanu, selections from In a Glass Darkly
• Bram Stoker, Dracula
• Vernon Lee, selections from Hauntings and Other Fantastic Tales
• H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Evaluation: TBA, but will include a major research essay.

Format: Seminar.

Prerequisite: This course is for advanced students. Expected preparation is 3 or 4 prior courses in English literature.

Description: Without by any means attempting to exhaust its subject, this course surveys twentieth-century Irish literature: poetry, drama, and fiction. Discussion will focus to some extent on the correlation between Irish political history and Irish literature; the two domains cannot be kept separate. To that end, we will consider the relation of the Irish Republic to Northern Ireland, as well as the relation between Britain and Ireland. “Modernity” and “postcolonial” theory will be applied, as will discussions of the “Celtic Tiger” in the 1990s and early 2000s. We will discuss form (lyric, sonnet, long poem, short story, drama, novel) and the utility that different modes of literary expression have. Works by some, if not most, of the following writers will appear on the syllabus: W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain, Seamus Heaney, Brendan Behan, Elizabeth Bowen, Samuel Beckett, Eavan Boland, Patrick Kavanagh, Edna O’Brien, Colm Toibin.

Texts: This list of texts is provisional and subject to change. A final selection will be made in October 2021.

• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September
• Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls
• Colm Toibin, Blackwater Lightship
• Relevant materials posted on myCourses

Evaluation: Essays, attendance and participation, final exam.

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: This course introduces students to the roles, responsibilities, and procedures of the three key management positions on a live performance’s production team: Production Manager, Stage Manager, and Technical Director. There will be a required practical component for PM, SM and TD with the Festival of Staged Readings in Moyse Hall, Department of English Director’s Projects, Arts Undergraduate Theatre Society, Tuesday Night Café theatre or another approved theatre company. Placements for the practical component will be the responsibility of each student to secure. The composition of the class will vary depending on student emphasis.

The course is organised according to a standard production schedule: from pre-production (e.g,. auditions, securing rights, professional attitude) through rehearsals (e.g., calls and postings, production agreements, dress rehearsal) to public performance (e.g., show reports, backstage supervision, front of house). Skills which may be covered include creating schedules and adapting them as necessary. We will look at overall production schedules, rehearsal schedules and production week schedules. We will take an in-depth look at each day within a production week, exploring what to expect, prepare for and who is responsible for what. We will discuss production meetings and why they are important and how to lead them productively. We will explore navigating conflict situations and how to handle these situations with respect. We will look at the industry standard organizational charts (theatre hierarchy) and each position within this structure. We will touch briefly on different agreements within the theatre industry, such as Equity, and their impact on a production.

Each student will create a production binder specific to their role (as PM, SM, or TD) in their practical component placement, which will be evaluated periodically throughout the semester. To support your theatre management work, the class will:

• create tools for this binder, such as production sections, scene breakdowns and character breakdowns;
• create templates for effective team communication such as agendas, production notes, schedules and using online applications;
• have practical sessions on blocking notation for a scene as well as how to prepare a stage management binder for calling the cues for a production;
• look at the industry protocols and standards for creating a clear and concise record of cues.

Each class will also provide an opportunity to discuss how each student’s production is progressing in a safe and non-judgemental environment in which support and collaborative solutions to any challenges being experienced can be provided.

Evaluation: Attendance and participation (15%); production binder (30%); production team assignment (20%); in class projects (15%); journal (20%).

Description: In this course, we will explore the rich and dynamic history of Black theatre and drama in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries across the United States and Canada. While we investigate what constitutes a “Black play,” we will also track the many movements, changes, and intersections that Black theatre has sustained over this period. We will transit from a Du Boisian call to make theatre “by us, for us, about us, and near us,” in the early twentieth century, to the Federal Theatre Project’s Black theatre initiatives and the pre-war movements, to historical milestones like A Raisin in the Sun’s Broadway run and the radical theatre of the Black Arts Movement; and into the contemporary moment, with African American playwrights and artists including August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Lynn Nottage, Robert O’Hara, Jeremy O. Harris, Anna Deavere Smith, and Marcus Gardley. In Canada, we will examine the works of Djanet Sears, Lorena Gale, Trey Anthony, and many others, including playwrights whose works have been staged by Montreal’s Black Theatre Workshop. Along the way, we will examine the intersections of Blackness and sexuality, gender, and class, centering the works of women and queer playwrights as well as those– like Sonia Sanchez and Adrienne Kennedy – who have in the past been excluded from Black movements but whose works deserve copious study. We will supplement our readings with embodied exercises and, where possible, trips to the theatre to see Black plays onstage.

Texts:

Plays (many available digitally through the Black Drama Database), including:

• Amiri Baraka, Dutchman; Slave Ship
• W.E.B. Du Bois, The Star of Ethiopia
• Jackie Sibblies Drury, Fairview
• Lorena Gale, Angelique
• Jeremy O. Harris, Slave Play
• Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, An Octoroon
• Adrienne Kennedy, Funnyhouse of a Negro
• Tarell Alvin McCraney, The Brother/Sister Plays
• Lynn Nottage, Sweat
• Robert O’Hara, Insurrection: Holding History
• Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play; Topdog/Underdog
• Djanet Sears, Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God
• August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone; Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom; Fences

We will supplement our readings with online secondary sources by: Sandra L. Richards; Renee Alexander Craft, Kathy Perkins; LaDonna Forsgren; Rashida Shaw McMahon; E. Patrick Johnson; Soyica Colbert; and Douglas Jones.

Evaluation: 30% short response essays; 10% theatre review; 20% presentation; 10% participation and attendance; 30% final essay.

Description: In this course we will read some contemporary memoirs – essays and books – which are structured around trauma or rupture and in particular suggest a narrative of “before and after.” These narratives inevitably stress the relationships among people and which inform that trauma. But, also, we’ll look at how the narrator creates and shapes a story or stories in relation to cultural events and life, memories, emotions, the use of theory, food, the past, metaphor, objects, images, photos, language, conceptions of the truth, story-telling, trauma itself, time, among others.

Texts (tentative): books or selections from --

• Hunger, Roxane Gay
• The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson
• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot
• A History of My Brief Body, Billy-Ray Belcourt
• The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison
• How We Fight For Our Lives, Saeed Jones
• We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir, Samra Habib
• My Meteorite or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing, Harry Dodge

Personal essays (tentative): Cyrus Grace Dunham, Junot Diaz, YiYun Li, Zadie Smith, Claudia Rankine, James Baldwin.

Films: Stories We Tell (dir. Sarah Polley); I Am Not Your Negro (dir. Raoul Peck); Waban-Aki: People From Where the Sun Rises (dir. Alanis Obomsawin)

Theoretical essays by: Roland Barthes, Ben Yagoda, Sven Birkerts, Nancy K Miller, Michel Foucault, Sidonie Smith, Blake Morrison, Julia Watson

Evaluation (tentative): 20% short weekly responses (250 words each; 10 @ 2% each); 80% two short essays (c. 2000 words each; 40% each).

Format: Lecture, discussion, screenings.

Description: This course will focus on a main figure in Canadian Inuit literature: Alootook Ipellie. His work portrays many of the effects of colonialism and his own reactions in the contemporary world. Ipellie is introverted and spiritual but also radical and outspoken in his quest for meaning in a life where he lives in “two worlds” but with “one spirit”. His work reflects what was the reality for many Canadian Inuit, since 1950.

Ipellie’s work explores these themes in a variety of formats: cartoons, drawings, political articles, poetry and essays.

Texts:

• The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab. University of Ottawa, 2005
• Arctic Dreams and Nightmares. Alootook Ipellie. Theytus Books Ltd. 1993. Available as a course pack.
  
  Diary is available at Paragraphe bookstore; Arctic Dreams will be available at the James bookstore as a course pack. Poems and articles will be distributed in class and/or on myCourses.

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Description: 

To read a book by an indigenous author is a step towards reconciliation.

Often times, Inuit literature is thought to be mainly legends or myths, recorded by outsiders. This course will focus on works actually written by Canadian Inuit, in a variety of formats: diary, poetry and essays, satirical and political cartoons, drawings, articles, animated films, autobiographies or short stories. It will examine some of the earliest work, but the course focuses mainly on contemporary times.

The course will also include several films that are connected to the texts.

The course will begin by looking at the diary of the first Canadian Inuit writer, Abraham Ulrikab, from Nunatsiavut. He wrote in 1880.

Saqiyuq is a collaborative life story told by three Inuit women, between 1930- 1995 in Nunavut. The three women lived the extraordinary changes that took place during these years.

Alootook Ipellie, 1951-2007, is also from Nunavut. He is an Inuit artist whose work portrays many of the effects of colonialism and his own reactions to that situation in the contemporary world. Ipellie, who is from Nunavut, is introverted and spiritual but also radical and outspoken in his quest for meaning in a life where he lives in “two worlds” but with “one spirit”. His work reflects what was and is the reality for many Canadian Inuit, since 1950. Some of his stories and cartoons will be included in the modules.

Daisy Watt remembers her youth in Nunavik in a story that will be posted on My Courses. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, her granddaughter, is also from Nunavik and writes a compelling story of the Inuit and climate change in the midst of cultural, social and political changes. Her book, The Right to be Cold portrays the contemporary world in which modern-day Inuit live. She was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize because of her work.

Evaluation: TBA

Description: In her book Woman, Native, Other, Trinh Minh-Ha criticizes the essentialism with which women from the “Third World” are treated by the West: with special readings, seminars, and workshops dedicated to the “native woman,” it is as if “everywhere we go, we become Someone’s private zoo.” Trinh’s outburst highlights the uneasy yet attractive alliances between feminists in the West and those in the rest of the world and between postcolonial studies and gender scholarship. Starting from these convergences, in this course we will discuss the differences between Western and African forms of feminism and womanism and we will trace the evolution of forms of femininity and masculinity in various colonial and neocolonial contexts in Africa. We will talk about the relationship between women and their bodies, ideas of beauty, rebellion and conformity. We will equally explore normative and subversive forms of masculinity, and the role of states in creating willing soldiers. Theoretical readings by bell hooks, Sara Suleri, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Frantz Fanon, Chimamanda Adichie and others will help us think about relations between mothers and daughters, love in a time of war, sexuality, violence inscribed on the female body, and representations of women.

Texts (preliminary list):

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah
• Ama Ata Aidoo: Our Sister Killjoy
• Mark Behr: The Smell of Apples
• Tsitsi Dangarembga: Nervous Conditions
• Akwaeke Emezi: The Death of Vivek Oji
• Lewis Nkosi Mating Birds 
• Nnedi Okorafor: Binti 

Films:

• The Battle of Algiers. Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo 
• Faat Kine. Dir. Ousmane Sembene (e-video)
• Reassamblage. Dir. Trinh T. Minh-ha
• U-Carmen eKhayelitsha. Dir. Mark Dornford-May

Assessment: Essay, presentation and article review, class discussion.

Description: Sustained representations of Jews and Muslims appear frequently in Middle English drama, romance, travel writing, and other genres after 1350, though few Jews or Muslims could be found living in England in the later Middle Ages (ca. 1350-1500). In fact, the Jews had been expelled from England in 1290. Later literary representations would seem, then, to stem from knowledge of continued international religious politics or textual influences that included older characterizations from England, the European continent, Asia, and Africa. English chivalric romances often ranged geographically over the regions like the Iberian Peninsula, with its sizeable Muslim population, or took place in an imagined Roman Empire that aligned pre-Christian Roman rulers with “Saracen” (Muslim) forces, pitting them both against Christians and drawing on the fraught memory of the medieval crusades. Muslim soldiers, leaders, and women (who sometimes fight) seem to participate with Christians in a shared chivalric value system and are often praised. In these contexts, the language of what we might call “race” is bound up with questions of religious belief and conversion. Christianity in late-medieval England was also a strange beast. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we witness the rise of a vibrant lay piety, the first complete translation of the Bible into English, and an academic heresy that spilled over the walls of the university and into the streets. Some of these developments were in turn met by a severe response that was not always consistent with attitudes on the continent. Accusations of heresy sometimes employed the language of interfaith polemic, and the lines that were drawn between heresy and non-Christian religions were not always clear.

Students in this course will study English literary representations of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity from the later Middle Ages (approximately 1350-1500). Some sessions will be spent working with original medieval manuscripts in McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections. Most texts will be read in the original Middle English. Prior experience with Middle English is not mandatory or expected, and regular practice with the language will be included in many seminar sessions.

Texts (provisional):

• The Chester Passion Play (excerpts)
• Miracles of the Virgin
• Geoffrey Chaucer, Prioress’ Tale, Man of Law’s Tale
• The Croxton Play of the Sacrament
• The Siege of Jerusalem
• The Book of John Mandeville
• The Sultan of Babylon
• The King of Tars
• Floris and Blancheflour
• John Gower, Tale of Constance (from Confessio amantis)

Evaluation:

Analytical reading journal: 30%
Research proposal: 5%
Final research project: 35%
Translation exercises: 10%
Participation: 20%

Format: Seminar.

Description: In this course we will explore the various psychological, political, generic, rhetorical, and sociological parameters of comic recognition and misrecognition in theorists and practitioners from classical Athens to the present day. We will read and discuss theoretical accounts of comedy, humour, and laughter by Northrop Frye, C.L. Barber, Mikhail Bakhtin, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Hutcheson, Lord Shaftesbury, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Mary Douglas, James Feibleman, Hugh Duncan, René Girard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Baudelaire, and Noel Carroll, among others. As a way of grounding these various theoretical accounts in specific examples, we will also study two plays, a novel, and a film.

Texts: Most of the readings are available via the library’s digital holdings. Henri Bergson’s Essay on Laughter and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice are available at The Word bookstore at 469 rue Milton.

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

Format: Lecture and class discussion.

Description: This course will approach the form of autobiography in the Enlightenment through a brief survey of the European tradition of autobiographical texts from antiquity to the Renaissance. Classic models such as Plato’s Apology, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and Saint Augustine’s Confessions will help us appreciate the motivation and methods of later writing in autobiographical form. Our readings will include not only “real” autobiographies but also first-person narratives in philosophy and literature that provide a background for understanding the emergence of the novel in the “long” eighteenth century (1650-1850). A basic assumption of this course is that the modern novel absorbs and adapts conventions of spiritual autobiography and the presuppositions of selfhood in other forms of first-person storytelling such as dramatic monologue, letter writing, and the diary. We will analyze particular autobiographical narratives to develop a critical vocabulary that should enable us to conceptualize key problems in the evolving relationship between truth and fiction in the history of first-person narrative. Our study of these problems in the representation of inner experience and the sociohistorical conditions of subjectivity will focus on claims to truth or authenticity in relation to the logic of eros, confession, and self-construction.

Texts: All the books below contain required reading for the course. The books will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640).

• Plato, The Apology and Related Dialogues (Broadview)
• Plato, Plato on Love (Hackett)
• Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations (Oxford, Penguin, or Hackett)
• Saint Augustine, Confessions (Hackett or Oxford)
• Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova (Oxford or Penguin)
• Benvenuto Cellini, My Life (Oxford)
• Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Hackett)
• Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Broadview)
• Denis Diderot, The Nun (Oxford or Penguin)
• Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Broadview)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther (Norton or Penguin)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Oxford or Penguin)
• Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Broadview)

Evaluation: Presentations (40%), participation (10%), and a final term paper (50%). The "presentations" will consist of the submission of questions for seminar discussion. "Participation" refers to contributions to discussion and consultation about the paper topic. Insofar as possible, regular attendance is expected except when technical issues, medical problems, or other personal emergencies arise.

Format: Seminar.

Prerequisite: ENGL 230 and ENGL 269 and/or permission of the instructor.

Application procedures: Limited enrollment. Permission of instructor required. Admission to the course will be by application and interview. Please submit your written application to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca. See below for the full description of the written application.* You will be contacted about an interview after your application is received. If your application is delayed please express your interest by e-mail.

Description: Preparation of the dramatic text for production:
1) script analysis, research, planning, 2) auditions and casting, 3) the rehearsal process (with a strong focus on the actor/director relationship and actor/actor relationship), 4)technical elements, 5) performance in a festival of short plays.

Evaluation: Class participation and attendance; Scene rehearsal and performance; Metaphor/Action Board; Research; Production Book (script analysis, and annotated script) and a journal of the entire process (including final reflections); Workshop Production

Texts:

• The Directors Eye by John Ahart (Meriwether Publishing, 2001).
• The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau (Theatre Communications Group, 2005).
• Actions: The Actors' Thesaurus by Marina Caldarone (Maggie Lloyd-Williams, 2004).

*Written Application: Submit answers to the following questions to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca.
Subject Heading of your e-mail: Directing for the Theatre Class Application. In your application please use both the number and subject for each response:

1. Directing Experience (include scenes and relevant leadership roles):
2. Acting Experience:
3. Improvisation Experience (use your imagination on this, as it may not have been named improvisation, but when have you improvised in a situation or theatrical endeavor):
4. Theatre courses taken at McGill or elsewhere:
5. Any other relevant experience:
6. What will you bring to this course? Discuss special attributes and personality traits. Talk about your ability as a collaborator.
7. What do you hope to get out of this course?
8. Expected year of graduation and Major(s) and Minor(s):
9. Have you taken ENGL 230? ENGL 269?

Prerequisites: Registration for this class is by application only. Interested students should email me at ned.schantz [at] mcgill.ca with the subject heading “application to ENGL 472” stating their interest in the course and qualifications.

Expected Student Preparation and Commitment: In most cases, students will be expected to have earned a solid “B” or better in a 300-level film or literature course, but strong students from other fields will be considered. Students interested primarily in fulfilling a degree requirement will be directed elsewhere, as there are many ways to complete requirements (having said that, it will count toward the 400-level theory requirement as well as the Major Author requirement). 20 applicants will be admitted. All admitted students are expected to make the course a priority, keeping up with work and attending every seminar meeting.

Description: Drawing substantially upon Narrative Theory and Queer Theory, this film and lit course will attempt to chart an important cultural problematic associated with the work of Henry James, where a view of the social world as an unwelcoming and barely penetrable murk solicits a corresponding formal investment in restricted narration and the “scenic” treatment of narrative events (showing rather than telling). Pursuing this complex in the work of prominent novelists such as Carson McCullers, James Baldwin, and Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as in several films, we will consistently encounter sensitive and often underaged protagonists struggling to master situations that are saturated with the plans and desires of others. Faced with the problem of other minds in many acute forms, these characters will help us learn how to read in the fullest possible sense.

Texts: Coursepack and several novels.

Evaluation: Journals, short assignments, term paper, participation.

Format: Seminar.

Expected Preparation: This course is intended for students in the Cultural Studies stream who have completed ENGL 275, 277, and 359, although it is also open to advanced students in other streams who are interested in the topic, as well as students from outside of the English department. This course fulfills the Major Figure requirement of the Cultural Studies major, and can be counted towards the World Cinema minor, provided that the student has not exceeded their allowed courses in the English department.

Description: Jonas Mekas (1922-2019) was not only one of the most significant moving image artists, but the single most important advocate of experimental film in North America. Born in Lithuania and imprisoned during World War II, Mekas emigrated to New York as a displaced person in the late 1940s. There, he became best known as the most outspoken and influential advocate of the New American Cinema, as well as the founder and driving force behind several crucial film institutions that supported the work of a wide circle of other artists, including Film Culture magazine, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque, and Anthology Film Archives. Yet Mekas was also the most exemplary diary filmmaker of the twentieth century, who managed to create an extraordinary and genre-defining oeuvre of first person, poetic cinema. Although this course will examine Mekas’s multiple roles as critic, poet, and Underground cinema activist, it privileges an in-depth study of his pioneering work as experimental filmmaker in order to appreciate and understand his critical articulation of a thoroughly anti-industrial and anti-capitalist cinema. By situating Mekas’s films in relation to the historical, political, and aesthetic concerns from which they emerged, and studying them alongside a curated selection of artistic works by other members of his artistic circle—including Stan Brakhage, Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, George Maciunas, Peter Kubelka, and Michael Snow--this course will explore his profound contributions to history of alternative cinema. Yet in a world in which forging a meaningful path as an activist and thinker has become ever more fraught by political, economic, and ecological crises of our era, this course also consciously looks towards Mekas as a model of how to be a socially engaged artist and dedicated activist and community leader.

Films:

• Guns of the Trees (Jonas Mekas, 1961)
• Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rubin, 1963)
• The Brig (Jonas Mekas, 1964)
• Walden: Diaries Notes and Sketches (Jonas Mekas, 1969)
• Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (Jonas Mekas, 1972)
• Lost, Lost, Lost (Jonas Mekas, 1976)
• Paradise Not Yet Lost, or Oona’s Third Year (Jonas Mekas, 1980)
• This Side of Paradise (Jonas Mekas, 1995)
• As I was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Jonas Mekas, 2000)
• Lithuania and the Collapse of the USSR (Jonas Mekas 2008)
• Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man (Jonas Mekas, 2012)

Texts:

• David E. James, ed. To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground
• Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker, ed. Jonas Mekas Interviews
• Jonas Mekas, I Had Nowhere to Go
• Jonas Mekas and Anne Konig, I Seem To Live: The New York Diaries
• Selected essays by P. Adams Sitney and other critics

Evaluation: 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. In additional to writing one 10-12 page final paper or making an equivalent creative project, students will be expected to keep a video and/or written diary of their thoughts and impressions.

Format: In addition to two lecture/ discussions per week, students must come to one (sometimes epically long) mandatory in-person screening every week. Guest speakers will visit throughout the term.

Expected Preparation: All applicants welcome, although priority will be given to Drama & Theatre Majors and Minors. It is possible to add a Drama & Theatre Minor to an existing Major or Minor in another Department.

Description: Costumes do not exist in a vacuum; they respond to social, technological, and political factors specific to the era in which they were created. They are inextricably linked to the art and architecture of their day as they are to the current political and moral beliefs. A micro mini skirt comments on the sexual mores of the 1960’s as succinctly as any treatise on sexual liberation. We, along with Webster's Dictionary, use the term “costume” to mean a style of clothing, ornaments, and hair used especially during a certain period, in a certain region, or by a certain class or group. The costume that we study is Western, and our examination moves from different geographic centres as each takes prominence as fashion centres. Our general path begins in France in the Napoleonic era, moves to England with Queen Victoria and her son Edward, and then gradually includes North America in the 21st century.

The structure of this class will alternate between one class where the instructor presents costume information, and the following class where a designated group of students will respond with an oral presentation to contextualize the styles of the era. The instructor will present the costume history of each specific era through images, example pieces, and discussion. The instructor’s main lecture tool is a PowerPoint presentation with fashion images drawn directly from each period.

In the next class, students will present their oral projects, which respond to the specific era. Each student in the presentation group will handle one specific topic relating to the era. Topics for presentations include Art, Music and Dance, Science and Technology, Popular Culture, and Historical Context. Optional topics include Architecture, Furniture Design, Politics, and Advertising. Each student presents twice during the semester.

By listening to their fellow students’ presentations, the class will be able to answer questions such as: What is the common aesthetic between furniture and clothing design of the Victorian era? How does the music of the 1920’s effect dance, and in turn, clothing styles? How do the political and economic realities of the Great Depression impact fabric usage during the 1930’s? Historical overview of costumes will be enhanced by an inquisitive look at the link between clothing and the culture that created them. The goal is to see the bigger picture of the inter-related nature of different disciplines, and how each impacts the system as a whole. Although this class specifically relates to fashion, it is also a way of seeing and understanding larger cultural, social, historical, and political contexts.

An important anchor point for the semester comes from James Laver, in his book, The Education of an Iconographer (Andre Deutsch, London, 1963). “After studying the What and When, I began to wonder about the How and Why.” This class provides the wider context in which the students themselves uncover the “How and Why” in order to contextualize the instructor’s lecture about the “What and When” of changing clothing styles.

Expected learning outcomes:

• Increased ability to identify the different social, cultural, and political forces that cause fashion to change.
• Increased understanding of the inter-related nature of different disciplines, and how each impacts the fashion system as a whole.
• Understand the zeitgeist of a particular era, and how it changes over time.
• Be able to identify and contextualize the changing ideals of beauty and body image. Gain understanding of the constantly shifting nature of the idealized figure type, and translate that into a more accepting notion of body positivity.
• Increased ability to accurately identify period clothing, settings, and artistic movements, and to place them within a cultural context.
• Increased familiarity with music and dance of each era, along with an opportunity to get up and dance!

Texts: None required. Instructor presentations are available on myCourses.

Evaluation: Participation/Discussion 20%, Sketch Book 20%, first Oral presentation 20%, Second oral presentation 20%, Final Essay or Creative Project 20%.
Exact distribution may be suject to change.

Format: Classes alternate between lectures by the instructor and oral presentations by the students. Each student will do two oral presentations during the semester. Students are expected to particpate in Discussion Boards throughout the semester, as well as keep a sketch book to record the changing silhouettes of each era.
Imporant note: it is not necessary to have aptitude or experience sketching.

Description: The Digital Humanities is an emerging sub-field within the humanities (particularly the study of literature and culture) that combines traditional humanistic methods, such as close reading and historical analysis, with data science and computational approaches, such as text-mining and statistical analysis. This course offers both an applied and critical introduction to this new field of inquiry and academic study.

The first two-thirds of the class will offer hands-on instruction in basic computer programming and statistical analysis (focusing on Python) for the analysis of literary and cultural texts. The goal will be to train students in popular text-mining methods, such as topic modeling, to study large corpora of cultural material, such as novels, at scale. In this part of the class, no prior training in computer science or statistics is assumed. This part thus doubles as an accessible introduction to computing and statistical science for humanities students. Further, we will also read several recent examples of digital humanist scholarship to see how scholars have begun to use these tools to develop new arguments about literature and history, and potentially to replicate and explore the various methods they use, from the ground-up.

The final part of the class will provide a critical perspective on the use of technology and data in the humanities. What does it mean to quantify literature and art? Should we be skeptical of the increasing incursion of technology and empiricism into the humanities? How do we synthesize humanistic and scientific perspectives on knowledge-making – is it possible? Here we will read important recent studies that critique the growing ubiquity of data and algorithms in the university as well as society in general. This perspective will allow us to contextualize and critically reflect on the first, “applied” portion of the class.

Texts (sample):

• Katherine Bode, A World of Fiction
• Katherine Hayles, How We Think
• Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression
• Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction
• Andrew Piper, Enumerations
• Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds
• Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons

Evaluation: TBA

Format: TBA

Prerequisites: By arrangement with individual instructor. Permission must be obtained from the Department before registration.

Description:  

• This course is normally not available to students who are not Majors or Honours students in the Department.
• Intended for advanced and/or specialized work based on an extensive background in Departmental studies. 

Application Deadlines:

Fall 2021 Term: Monday, September 13, 2021 by 4:00 PM

engl495_496_application_2021_22.pdf (Also available in the Students Affairs Office, Arts Building, Room 155)

Prerequisites: By arrangement with individual instructor. Permission must be obtained from the Department before registration.

Description:  

• This course is normally not available to students who are not Majors or Honours students in the Department.
• Intended for advanced and/or specialized work based on an extensive background in Departmental studies. 

Application Deadlines:

Winter 2022 Term: Monday, January 17, 2022 by 4:00 PM

engl495_496_application_2021_22.pdf (Also available in the Students Affairs Office, Arts Building, Room 155)

Description: For internship details, eligibility requirements, approval procedures and methods of evaluation, follow this link: https://www.mcgill.ca/arts-internships/students/credit/english

Application Form: covid_version-faculty_of_arts_internship_for_academic_credit_form.pdf