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McGill.CA / Department of English / Undergraduate / Courses

Undergraduate Courses (2024-2025)

Below is a tentative list of undergraduate courses to be offered in the 2024-2025 academic year.ĚýComplementary course listingsĚýcan be found here.Ěý

Each course offered in the Department of English begins with the designation ENGL followed a three digit number. The first digit of this course number offers a rough guide to the level of the course:

2 - U1

3 - U2

4 - U3

5 - U3/Graduate

Note: All 500-level courses and a certain number of 200-, 300-, and 400-level courses have limited enrolment and require the instructors' permission to register. Students hoping to enroll in these courses should consult relevant course descriptions for the procedures for application procedures.

100-Level
First Year Seminars

ENGL 199 - FYS: Form and Representation

Literature and Democracy: Trials of an American Selfhood

Professor Peter Gibian
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Description: In this seminar we will examine closely some of the most important, now-canonical writings produced by American authors in the early-to-mid 19th century—the formative decades following the new nation’s declaration of its independence from the English monarchy. This was a crucial era for the development of a distinctive American literature and for the testing of American conceptions of democracy. Many of the works we will read can be seen to have been written in direct dialogue with one another; this seminar will trace the way these writings (political treatises, philosophical meditations, personal essays, poems, or experimental short fictions) play out ongoing arguments exploring a wide range of competing notions of freedom or of democratic “individualism” (a new word coined in this era)—rival visions of the great powers or grave limitations of an American selfhood. Early readings may include excerpts from Franklin, Irving, Douglass, and Stowe, but the central focus will be on intensive analysis of foundational writings by major authors of the “American Renaissance”—Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson. We will study these authors’ key works in their aesthetic and cultural context, as responses to urgent literary questions about authorship, readership, symbolism, and language as well as to urgent social questions raised by Jacksonian democracy, the era of the Common Man, the splintering effects of American individualism and diversity, and the problem of slavery in the land of the free.

Texts: Specific texts for purchase: TBA.

Evaluation: Tentative: Active and regular participation in discussions, 15%; series of brief textual analyses, 15%; two critical essays, 20% each; take-home final exam, 30%.

Format: Some framing lectures, but mainly multi-voiced seminar discussion.

200-Level
Introductory Courses

ENGL 202 - Dept. Survey of English Lit. 1

Professor Maggie Kilgour
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Prerequisite: Open only to English Majors and Minors, or by special written permission of instructor.

Description: Why does anyone write literature? Even more importantly for us, why and how does anyone read it? Many people, some of whom you will know, will argue that studying literature, above all English literature, is irrelevant and useless today. Yet during the Covid pandemic, many others found literary works of all kinds essential, not just as a form of escape into another world from a reduced reality but also as creative and imaginative stimuli that kept us active and engaged humans.This course considers these questions by looking at the development of major non-dramatic works in English from the Anglo-Saxon period to the mid-18th century. It introduces students to the early history of English literature, while reflecting upon the meaning of tradition, literary history, the idea of a “canon”, and especially the concept of “English.” We will trace the development through time of specific literary forms and genres, including lyric, elegy, epic, satire, sonnet, romance, and pastoral. At the same time, we will explore the relation of literature to religion, politics, and culture broadly, to see why in different periods people read and write literature, and to follow the changing ideas of the writer and his/her role in society.

Foundational to further study of literature in the department of English, ENGL 202 prepares students for more advanced and specialized study in the department. Discussions in conferences and written assignments will help students develop skills of interpretation and communication.

Texts: (texts are available at McGill Bookstore):

  • Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol 1. 9th Edition.
  • Edmund Spenser’s Poetry. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Anne Lake Prescott and Andrew D. Hadfield. (Included with the Anthology if purchased at the Bookstore)

Format: Lecture and conferences

Evaluation: 20% in class mid-term; 40% 5-6 page term paper; 30% formal final exam; 10% conference participation

ENGL 203 - Dept. Survey of English Lit. 2

Winter 2025

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Format: TBA

ˇĄąš˛šąôłÜ˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô:ĚýTBA

ENGL 215 - Intro to Shakespeare

Professor Kenneth Borris
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Description: A representative sampling of Shakespeare’s plays will survey the scope and variety of his drama as it relates to his cultural context and to most of the main genres of his writing. Shakespeare began creating plays around 1589, and the plays addressed in this course represent the development of his art from somewhat after its beginnings, up to its final phase, around 1612. They will be dealt with in chronological order, as in the following list of the course readings. The course will thus provide a strong foundation for appreciating and understanding Shakespeare’s drama.

Texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640.

Since this course will have conferences, one particular day of classes (TBA) will be cancelled after the first week or two of term, throughout the rest of the term, and conferences will instead be provided at various times on that particular day instead. You will choose the conference time that suits your other commitments.

Texts:

  • A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  • As You Like It
  • Twelfth Night
  • Othello
  • King Lear
  • The Winter’s Tale
  • The Tempest

Evaluation: term paper, 45%; take-home final exam, 35%; course attendance and participation, 20%

Format: lectures and weekly conferences

ENGL 226 - American Literature 2

African American Literature and the Century of the Color Line

Professor Camille Owens
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Description: In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois forecast that the problem of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the color line.” With this pronouncement, Du Bois foreshadowed racism’s long endurance while asserting the role of writers like himself in diagnosing, deconstructing, and contesting it. This course surveys the writing of African American authors after Du Bois whose experiments with form, narrative, and style built a formidable black literary culture in America while working to dismantle white supremacy’s structure. From Harlem Renaissance modernisms, to mid-century social realism, to the postmodern Gothic and Afrofuturism, this course examines how patterns of black migration, urban social cultures, and diasporic liberation struggles propelled African American literature in new directions, while also discerning lineages connecting twentieth-century African American literature to the foundational work of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors who wrote under slavery and toward abolition. Developing both formalist and historicist practices for reading novels, poems, short stories, and essays by such authors as Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Octavia Butler, students in this course will practice foundational skills of literary study, while building a broader toolkit for cultural analysis.

Texts: (subject to minor change)

  • Nella Larsen, Quicksand
  • Ann Petry, The Street
  • Richard Wright, Native Son
  • Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
  • Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada
  • Toni Morrison, Beloved
  • Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Format: Lecture and discussion conferences

Evaluation:ĚýParticipation (10%), weekly discussion posts (10%), short essay 1 (15%), short essay 2 (20%) midterm exam (20%), final exam (25%)

ENGL 229 - Canadian Literature 2

Professor Robert Lecker
Fall 2024
Time TBA

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

Description: A survey of English Canadian poetry and prose from the Second World War to the present. We will read a range of poetry and short fiction by many of Canada’s most accomplished writers in order to explore ideas about the nature of Canada and the literary representation of race, identity, politics, and indigenous experience in Canada. In addition to looking at the work of major authors from 1945 to the present, the lectures will also cover such topics as Canadian literary nationalism, realism, postmodernism, and different forms of experimentation. We will also look at the idea of the north as a central metaphor in Canadian writing and will discuss the economic and cultural forces accounting for the construction of a national literature. Students will be introduced to several concepts related to literary analysis. Please note that in addition to weekly lectures there will be one mandatory conference meeting (one hour) each week.

Required texts: TBD.

Evaluation: Tentative: Lecture attendance (10%); conference attendance (10%); participation (10%); discussion boards (10%); in-class essays (30%); final take-home exam (30%).

Format: Lecture and conferences.

ENGL 230 - Intro to Theatre Studies

Professor Katherine Zien
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Description: Theatre is a tree with deep roots and many branches: not only does the history of world theatre stretch millennia long, but theatre studies encompasses both textual analysis and investigation of all the aspects of a staged production: lighting, sound, movement, vocalizations and uses of language, set design, and stage-audience interactions. Given the complexity and breadth of the field, this course provides a critical introduction to theatre studies, focusing on play texts, drama theory, and theatre history. We will cover both western and non-western theatrical events, examining a range of works from Ancient Greek tragedy through contemporary and postcolonial performance, and including the Department of English mainstage show. Through the plays, we will examine what “theatre” is and does in different periods and places. We will learn how theatre is constituted by the material and social conditions of performance, codified in dramatic genres, and conceptualised in dramatic theory.

Required Texts:

  • Textbook TBA.
  • Additional play texts and production videos, where available, will be provided through MyCourses.

Format: Lecture, discussion, and group work.

Evaluation: participation: 10%; in-class assignments: 10%; short essays: 20%; midterm exam: 30%; final exam: 30%

ENGL 269 - Introduction to Performance

Professor Amber Rose Johnson
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Course Description: This course is designed to support students in exploring the use of the body and voice as tools for communication and expression in the presence of an audience. While the course will introduce students to tools and techniques used in acting and improvisation, including vocal and physical warm-ups, theater and improvisational games and simple scene study, we will also explore other, experimental modes of performance that exceed the frame of “acting”. Together we will attend to embodied modes of imagination, creativity and spontaneity. Throughout the course, you will be asked to commit fully to the group and the creative process, and you may be expected to work on your own, outside of class, rehearsing or preparing performance materials.

Evaluation: Attendance and participation (20%), written analysis of performance from syllabus (15%), Written reflection on Improv exercises (10%), written analysis of performance experience outside of class (15%) In-Class performances (20%), Group performance (20%)

Texts:

  • Refractions: Solo, Edited by Donna-Michelle St. Bernard and Yvette Nolan

Format: Group discussions, practical exercises, class presentations

ENGL 275 - Intro to Cultural Studies

Richard Jean So
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Course Description: This course, a required course for Cultural Studies majors and minors, will introduce various critical efforts to theorize the aesthetics, semiotics, and politics of mass and popular culture. We start by looking at some foundational texts and theories in this tradition, moving from British Culture Marxism to the Frankfurt School. Next, we explore more specific attempts to extend this tradition to look at questions of gender, race, and empire by key scholars such as Edward Said and Judith Butler. Then we look at some general attempts to theorize culture in relationship to “popular culture,” postmodernism, and finally, ending with technology and media. Overall, this class provides a survey of a number of founding texts in the tradition of Cultural Studies, as well as some important more recent attempts to enhance this tradition to take on pressing contemporary concerns of identity, mass media, and science.

Format: Lectures are from 1.35pm to 2.25pm on Monday and Wednesday; weekly TA-led conferences (except during the first week of the term, during which there will be lectures on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with no conferences). Conference attendance is mandatory. Registration for conferences will open on the first week of the semester. Most conferences will take place on Friday but it is possible you will have a conference on another day.

Required Texts: All essays will be posted on MyCourses a week before the reading is due.

Evaluation: Test 1: 30%; Test 2: 30%; Conference presentation: 30%; Conference attendance: 10%

ENGL 277 - Introduction to Film Studies

Professor Ned Schantz
Fall 2024
Time TBA
Screening TBA

Description: This course is designed to prepare students for future film courses at McGill. It is therefore dedicated to three main goals: establishing a frame of reference for the history of film and film theory, introducing key analytical concepts and skills, and inspiring an ongoing interest in film.

The course will initially be restricted to Cultural Studies majors/minors and Film Studies minors. If space permits, other students may be admitted.

Texts: Coursepack

Evaluation: quizzes 20%, short paper 25%, participation 15%, posted class notes 5%, final 35%.

Format: Lecture and conferences

ENGL 279 - Introduction to Film History

Introduction to Film History

Professor Ara Osterweil
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Class Meetings: 4 hour block, time and date TBA

Prerequisites: This is one of the two required core courses for the World Cinema minor. It also counts as one of the History requirements for the Cultural Studies major.

Description: This course introduces key historical moments, cinematic movements, formal styles, as well as historiographical and theoretical debates in the history of world cinema. Tracing the transformation of cinema from its emergent era to the present, this course maps out diverging trajectories and merging paths of exemplary filmmakers and filmmaking collectives in various nations and geo-political regions against the backdrop of the changing historical and technological media environments. Students will read both historical and contemporary texts to gain a broad sense of the seminal debates in film studies, theory, and criticism. This course aims to foster a critical understanding of cinema as an international, distributed, and polycentric phenomenon.

Format: Lecture and screening in one weekly four-hour block.

Evaluation: Attendance: 10%; In-class quizzes (3, each worth 10%): 30%; Midterm Exam: 30%; Final Exam: 40%

Possible Films:

  • Early shorts by the Lumière brothers, George Melies, D.W. Griffith, etc.
  • The Last Laugh (F.W. Murnau, Germany, 1924)
  • Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, USSR, 1925)
  • The Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, France, 1939)
  • Rome Open City (Roberto Rossellini, Italy, 1945)
  • Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray, India, 1955)
  • Good Morning (Yasujiro Ozu, Japan, 1959)
  • Cleo From Five to Seven (Agnes Varda, France, 1962)
  • Black Girl (Ousmane Sembene, 1966, Senegal)
  • Daisies (Věra ChytilovĂĄ, Czechoslovakia, 1966)
  • Macunaima (Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Brazil, 1969)
  • The Marriage of Maria Braun (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, West Germany, 1979)
  • Red Sorghum (China, Yi-Mou Zhang, 1987)
  • The Apple (Samira Makhmalbaf, Iran, 1998)
  • The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, US, 2012)

Readings by theorists and filmmakers including:

  • Alexandre Astruc
  • AndrĂŠ Bazin
  • Chris Berry Tom Gunning
  • AimĂŠ CĂŠsaire
  • Bliss Cua Lim
  • Oswald de Andrade
  • Sergei Eisenstein
  • Carlos Estevam
  • Frantz Fanon
  • Julio GarcĂ­a Espinosa
  • Teshome H. Gabriel
  • Claire Johnston
  • Siegfried Kracauer
  • Hamid Naficy
  • Gregory Nowell-Smith
  • Satyajit Ray
  • Glauber Rocha
  • Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino
  • Cesare Zavattini

ENGL 280 - Intro to Film as Mass Medium

Adaptation

Professor Trevor Ponech
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Prerequisite: ąˇ´Ç˛Ôąđ 

Description: Adaptation--roughly speaking, the practice of basing a movie on a literary or other source-work--is a remarkably common, perhaps the historically dominant, strategy movie makers employ in the course of inventing and shaping their works. ENGL 280 Cinema as Mass Medium surveys some theories of adaptation. Our first order of business will be to look at ways in which the artistic genre of adaptation has been conceptualized. We'll pay special attention to puzzles and problems surrounding the notion that movies are texts and that adaptations are "intertexts" or "palimpsestic texts." Textualist definitions of adaptation will be compared with alternative approaches grounded in the idea that cinema is an essentially nontextual medium. To explore this alternative, we will need to clarify what it is that we are talking about when we use terms like “text," "medium," and “cinema.” This discussion opens onto an examination of whether adaptation essentially involves a medium shift, that is, a change from one mode or vehicle of expression (the literary text, for instance) to another (the cinematic display). At the same time, we'll survey some varieties of adaptation. Cinematic adaptations can be described as versions of their source works. For one thing to be a version of another necessarily means that features of one be markedly informed or shaped by features of the other. But not all versions are, for instance, faithful to the original. Hence we'll link adaptation to the concepts of "fidelity," "artistic nesting," and "transgression." This discussion will, in turn, lead us to consider how best to go about critically appreciating an adaptation as an adaptation, that is, as a certain kind of artistic achievement. 

Movies: TBD

°ŐąđłćłŮ˛ő: ĚýA selection of readings drawn from contemporary film theory and aesthetic philosophy; a selection of novels and short fictional works.

ˇĄąš˛šąôłÜ˛šłŮžą´Ç˛ÔĚý(Tentative): conference participation 20%; midterm exam (short essay) 30%; final exam 50%

Format:  Lectures, discussions, in-class screenings, conference sections

ENGL 290 - Postcolonial&World Lits: Engl

Intro to Postcolonial and World Literature

Professor Sandeep Banerjee
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Description: This course provides a critical introduction to postcolonial and world literature by drawing on literary texts – novels, poems, short stories, and travelogues – from South Asia. The course examines how these texts conceive of, and represent, the lives and life-worlds of the South Asian region while situating them in relation to the critical and theoretical preoccupations of postcolonial and world literature studies. The course interrogates the (often contested) meanings of the term postcolonial and asks how it relates to categories such as anti-colonial and colonial besides familiarizing students with some of the key issues and contemporary debates in the field. In so doing, the course prepares students for further study in postcolonial and world literature.

Note 1: Attendance to TA conferences and, if scheduled, film screenings is mandatory. No exceptions.

Note 2: This is one of the required courses for the South Asian Studies minor (Stream 1: Culture and Civilization).

Possible Texts (to be finalized later):

Novels:

  • RK Narayan – The Guide (1958)
  • Salman Rushdie – Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
  • Mohammed Hanif – The Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008)
  • Megha Majumdar – A Burning (2020)

Travelogues:

  • Vikram Seth – From Heaven Lake (1983)

Short Stories: Selections from Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, Rabindranath Tagore, Sadaat Hasan Manto, Manik Banerjee

Poetry: Selections from Rabindranath Tagore; Arun Kolatkar

Evaluation: Take home exams and papers.

Format: Lectures and TA conferences.

ENGL 237 - Intro to Study of a Lit Form

Funny Forms and Genres: A Literary History of Comedy

Professor Carmen Mathes
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Description: This course surveys a wide-range of comedic forms and genres within the long sweep of literary history. What makes one thing funny and not another? Which jokes stay funny and which lose their sparkle over time? Can a joke provoke political change or provide consolation in difficult times? Along the way, we will explore Cicero’s theory of the ridiculous and Freud’s theory of jokes; plays by Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde; poetry by Alexander Pope, Aphra Behn, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll and others; the perfection of the marriage plot (in Emma and Autumn de Wilde’s 2020 film adaptation); physical comedy in the silent film era; a selection of stand-up; and finally Kevin Wilson’s novel Nothing To See Here (about children who regularly burst into flames).

Texts:

  • Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors
  • Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
  • Austen, Emma
  • Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

In-class screenings of:

  • Chaplin, Modern Times
  • de Wilde, Emma
  • Stand-up comedy TBD

Format: Lecture and discussion

Evaluation: TBD

300-Level
Intermediate Courses

ENGL 301 - Earlier 18th Century Novel

Professor David Hensley
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Description: This course will canvas some of the “origins” of the English novel and trace its development (particularly as anti-romance satire and realism) up to the mid-eighteenth century. Our readings and discussion will refer to the European context of the evolution of this narrative form in England. We will consider the novel as responding to a network of interrelated problems – of the self and its imaginative politics – at the representational crossroads of medieval epic, courtly romance, spiritual autobiography, picaresque satire, colonialist adventure, gallant intrigue, baroque casuistry, bourgeois conduct book, sentimental love story, moral treatise, psychological realism, and mock-heroic “comic epic in prose.” As the emerging literary “form of forms,” the early modern novel vibrantly juxtaposes and interweaves all these different generic strands. Our work together will aim at a critical analysis of the textual ideologies articulated in this experimental process of historical combination.

Texts: The required reading for this course will include most or all of the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts and editions below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in September 2024.)

  • The Song of Roland (Hackett)
  • Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (Oxford)
  • Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur (Oxford)
  • Abelard and Heloise, The Letters and Other Writings (Hackett)
  • Lazarillo de Tormes (Norton)
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote (Norton)
  • Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Clèves (Norton)
  • Aphra Behn, Oronooko and Other Writings (Oxford)
  • Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (Broadview)
  • Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Norton)
  • Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Oxford)
  • Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Oxford)

Evaluation: Paper (50%), tests (40%), participation (10%). Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies).

Format: Lectures and discussion.

ENGL 305 - Renaissance Eng Lit 1

Professor Wes Folkerth
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Description: In this course we will survey nondramatic literature in England the 1590s, one of the most remarkable decades in English literary history, one which saw the initial publication of major works by Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Deloney, John Marston, Robert Southwell, George Chapman, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, Richard Hooker and Sir Francis Bacon, among others. We will read and discuss examples from popular contemporary poetry and associated genres such as the sonnet sequence, the epyllion, the funeral elegy, and the pastoral. We will follow the decade’s prose as it ranges broadly from proto-novelistic romances to satirical pamphleteering, from underworld documentary to exotic travel narratives. Our literary study of the decade will also regularly cast an eye to other examples of the decade’s print culture, including contemporary news from abroad, tales of piracy on lawless seas, and accounts of witchcraft and other strange crimes.

Format: Lecture and class discussion

Evaluation: midterm exam (30%); final essay (30%); final exam (30%); conference participation (10%)

Texts: TBA

ENGL 306 - Theatre Hist: Mediev Early Mod

Professor Fiona Ritchie
Fall 2024
Time TBA

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

Description: ĚýThis course provides an overview of dramatic forms and theatrical practice in Britain from the medieval to the early modern period (c. 1300-1642). We will move from the earliest recorded vernacular play texts to the closure of the professional theatre in 1642, encompassing medieval religious drama and the theatre of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Rather than taking a chronological approach, we will examine early theatre in a way that highlights continuities as well as divisions between the medieval and the early modern stage. We will analyse the conditions of performance (playing spaces, actors, audience, technology, etc) as well as studying a selection of representative plays (looking at their form, function, aesthetic features, etc). Emphasis is placed on the plays as theatrical works rather than literary texts. To that end, we will pay close attention to historical documents that elucidate how these plays were originally performed and received.

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

Evaluation (Tentative): participation 10%; production journal 20%; midterm assignment analysing historical documents 30%; take home final exam 40%

Format: lecture, discussion, group work

ENGL 308 - English Renaissance Drama 1

Professor Wes FolkerthĚý
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Description: In this course we will survey the impressive yield of English Renaissance drama written by writers other than William Shakespeare. We will read twelve plays from the period, about one a week, including The Spanish Tragedy (Thomas Kyd), Gallathea (John Lyly), The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (Christopher Marlowe), Arden of Faversham (Anon), The Tragedy of Antony (Mary Sidney), The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Thomas Dekker), A Woman Killed with Kindness (Thomas Heywood), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Francis Beaumont), Volpone (Ben Jonson), A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (Thomas Middleton), The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster), and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (John Ford). We will study these plays as exemplars of swiftly-changing and varied theatrical tastes in the period. Many of these works provide purviews onto the cultural situation of early modern London that are rarely found in Shakespeare’s works.

Evaluation: Midterm (25%); Final Essay, 8-10 pages (35%); Final Exam (30%); Participation (10%)

Texts (available at the Word on Milton):

  • Kinney, Arthur F. and David A. Katz (eds). Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments. 3rd edition. Wiley/Blackwell, 2022. ISBN 978-1-118-82397-2.

Format: Lecture and class discussion.

ENGL 311 - Poetics

Fall 2024
Professor Eli MacLaren, Professor Miranda Hickman
Time TBA

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

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

Required Texts: (available at the McGill Bookstore)

  • Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2015.
  • Bausch, Richard, and R. V. Cassill, eds. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Shorter 8th ed. New York: Norton, 2015.
  • Ferguson, Margaret, Tim Kendall and Mary Jo Salter, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2018.

Recommended:

  • Messenger, William E., et. al. The Canadian Writer’s Handbook. 6th ed. Oxford UP, 2015.

Evaluation: First essay, close reading of poem, 4 pp.; second essay, on short story, secondary research required, 6 pp.; mid-term exam (in class); formal final examination common to all sections of Poetics; class attendance and participation; short assignments, such as pop quizzes, writing exercises, scansions, and recitations. This evaluation is the same for all sections of Poetics.

ENGL 313 - Canadian Drama and Theatre

Theatre and Difference in Quebec

Professor Erin Hurley​
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Expected Preparation: Previous university course in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies.

Description: This course will offer a selective survey of drama in Quebec from the 1950s to the present. With a focus on French-language theatre (to be read in English translation), we will trace the changing aesthetics and politics of this dynamic tradition, contextualising them in performance and social contexts, and alert to figurations of insiders and outsiders in the dramatic corpus. A secondary focus will be minority-language dramatic output and theatrical production in Quebec in the same period, with a particular emphasis on that produced in English.

This course also offers the opportunity to conduct primary-source research and analysis on under-documented, minority-language drama Quebec theatre. To this end, students will read and analyse largely unpublished plays by English-language Quebec playwrights. In addition, we will hear from theatre artists working in Montreal today in the form of guest-lectures and interviews.

Texts: Coursepack of critical and secondary readings. Plays will be selected to capitalize on the theatrical offerings in Montreal in Fall 2021. However, significant texts such as the following may feature on the reading list.

  • Claude Gauvreau, The Charge of the Expormidable Moose (La charge de l’orignal ĂŠpormyable)
  • Jovette Marchessault, Night Cows
  • Michel Tremblay, Les belles-sœurs
  • Collective, La nef des sorcières
  • David Fennario – Balconville.
  • Larry Tremblay, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi.
  • Omari Newton, Sal Capone, The Lamentable Tragedy of
  • Wajdi Mouawad, Scorched
  • Evelyne de la Chenelière, Bashir Lazar
  • Annabel Soutar, Seeds
  • Alexis Diamond and Hubert Lemire, Faux amis

Evaluation: Participation; posted class notes; corpus analysis; short paper.

Format: Discussions; lectures; presentations.

ENGL 314 - 20th Century Drama

Professor Sean Carney
Winter 2025
M/T/Th 13:35-14:25
Rutherford Physics 118

Description: This course will examine European and North American drama of the twentieth century. We will begin by studying the canonical realists of the late nineteenth century and the philosophy underlying their dramaturgy. This will lead us into a consideration of various positive and negative responses to the realist tradition. We will examine these plays in their original theatrical contexts, while at the same time positioning these dramas in relation to their individual social and political moments. We will also consider subsequent re-stagings of these plays and how they are repurposed in new contexts. The thematic rubric for the course will address generational conflicts and parent/child relationships in the various plays. The overall goal of the course is to impart to students a foundational understanding of the dominant trend in modern drama in the west.

Format: Lectures and conferences

Evaluation (tentative): First essay (5 pages): 25%; Class Attendance / Participation: 10%; Major Essay (6 pages): 30%; Final Exam: 35%

Please Note: In the event of extraordinary circumstances beyond the University’s control, the content and/or evaluation scheme in this course is subject to change.

Required Texts (Tentative):

  • Ibsen, Henrik. The Wild Duck in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
  • Strindberg, August. Miss Julie
  • Chekhov, Anton. Three Sisters
  • Pirandello, Luigi. Six Characters in Search of an Author in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
  • Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire (New Directions)
  • O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night, in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
  • Beckett, Samuel. Happy Days, in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
  • Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun (Vintage)
  • Pinter, Harold. The Caretaker (Faber)
  • Ryga, George. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (Talonbooks)
  • Tremblay, Michel. Forever Yours, Marie-Lou (Talonbooks)
  • Pollock, Sharon. Blood Relations (Newest)

ENGL 315 - Shakespeare


Winter 2025
Time TBA

Description: In this course we will focus only on the first half of Shakespeare’s career, the Elizabethan portion, which coincided with the rise of the professional theatre as the centerpiece of an emerging entertainment industry. We will begin with a number of very early plays, including The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, and Love’s Labor’s Lost. Before the midterm we will also read one of Shakespeare’s popular narrative poems, “Venus and Adonis.” After the midterm we will focus on three plays – Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (world classics of history, tragedy, and comedy) – which he wrote all within the space of about a single year. The Merchant of Venice, and Henry the Fourth, Part One round out the decade of the 1590s, and our course. The plan is to cover approximately one play per two weeks. Are you Shakespearienced? After this course you will be. The pace will be fast, with a view to giving students in the English major and minor programs a fuller appreciation of the scope of Shakespeare’s accomplishment in the first half of his career.

Format: Lecture and conference sections

Evaluation: midterm exam (30%); final essay (30%); final exam (30%); conference participation (10%)

Texts:

  • The Norton Shakespeare Volume I: Early Plays and Poems. 3rd edition. ISBN 978-0-393-93857-9. Will be available at The Word Bookstore on Milton Street. Norton also makes an electronic of this text available.

ENGL 316 - Milton

Professor Maggie Kilgour
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: This is a challenging course. Previous university courses in English literature, especially ENGL 202; some knowledge of Renaissance literature or culture is desirable.

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

Format: Lecture and discussion

Evaluation: 25% in class mid-term; 40% 10 pp. term paper on Paradise Lost; 25% take-home exam; 10% class participation.

Texts (required texts are available at McGill Bookstore):

  • Stella Revard ed, John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
  • Barbara Lewalski, ed. John Milton: Paradise Lost (Blackwell, 2007).
  • Selections from the prose: on MyCourses
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (recommended)
  • King James Bible (recommended)

Average enrolment: 30 students

ENGL 317 - Theory of English Studies 1

The Private and the Public

Professor Paul Yachnin
Fall 2024
T/Th, 16:00-17:30
Ferrier 456

Description: In this course, we study key literary works that have helped create our ideas about the private and the public and that think critically about the private and the public. These include three plays by Shakespeare, readings from the two influential “confessions” of St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and two novels—Passing by Nella Larson and Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Our literary reading will be supplemented by the work of a number of important thinkers, including Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Warner, and Alice Marwick and danah boyd.

The course is about the history of the ideas, practices, spaces, and technologies that have created the shifting zones of private and public life. We’ll move toward a deeper understanding of how our world has been shaped by the history of privacy and publicity (i.e., the condition of being public).

We will make use of ChatGPT and/or similar AI systems in the course.

Texts: Texts will be available from Paragraph Books. All the other readings for the course, including the sections of Rousseau’s Confessions, will be available on our myCourses site.

  • Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford University Press).
  • Twelfth Night, ed. Roger Warren and Stanley Wells (Oxford University Press).
  • All’s Well the Ends Well, ed. Susan Snyder (Oxford University Press).
  • Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press).
  • The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand, and The Stories. Edited and with an Introduction by Charles R. Larsen (Anchor Books, 2001). Please try to get this edition (paperback or as an ebook) so that we will have the same page numbers. You should know that Passing, a novel by a leading Black novelist and member of the Harlem Renaissance, contains the N-word.
  • Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts (London: Harper Collins, 2021).

Format: Lecture and discussion

Evaluation: Journal (30%); Individual presentation (15%); Participation (10%); Group presentation; (15%); Oral exam (30%).

ENGL 318 - Theory of English Studies 2

Socio-Historical Approaches

Professor David Hensley
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Expected Preparation: Limited to students in English programs.

Description: This course will survey the evolution of theories and methodologies in scholarship, especially in literary criticism, both from ancient intellectual models and in modern thought since the seventeenth century. As a basis for understanding and evaluating the role of “socio-historical approaches” in literary and cultural studies, we will contextualize the debate between formalism and historicism in the opposition between Kant’s philosophy and the alternative of dialectical thinking in Hegel, hermeneutics, and Marx. Our readings will reflect the far-reaching impact of this ideological opposition as a pattern of methodological assumptions and institutional practices. We will also review the formal and historical claim that one literary genre in particular – the novel – embodies or expresses the characteristic philosophical problems of modernity. Note: This course is not open to students who took ENGL 317 with Prof. Hensley.

Texts: Most of the books for this course will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). The textbooks listed below will be among those required. (Please note that Pluhar's translation of Kant is the only acceptable edition! The full list of texts and editions will be confirmed January 2025.)

  • Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, eds., Critical Theory Since Plato (edition to be discussed)
  • Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett)
  • Georg LukĂĄcs, The Theory of the Novel (MIT)

Evaluation: Papers (80%), test (10%), participation (10%). Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies).

Format: Lectures and discussion.

ENGL 319 - Theory of English Studies 3

Professor Richard Jean So
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Description: This course offers an advanced undergraduate level introduction to compelling new theoretical work in literary and cultural studies, notably after the high mark of “critical theory” ca. 1990. Topics to be covered include the New Formalism, Post-critical Reading, Afropessimism, Environmental Humanities, Digital Humanities, and other important new approaches in the discipline.

Workflow: Each week we’ll read one or two major works of criticism/theory, as well as one brief “cultural artifact” to ground our discussion of each week’s readings. Class will be split into two discussion halves, mapping on to the two class meetings each week. In the first, we’ll discuss the theoretical material; in the second we’ll “apply” the theoretical concepts to a specific text.

Readings: All readings will be posted to MyCourses as pdf files one week before they are due. You don’t have to purchase any books or texts on your own, only unless you want to. Some examples include: Forms by Levine; Slow Violence by Nixon; Distant Horizons by Underwood; In the Wake by Sharpe; etc.

Evaluation: Do all the reading, come to class, write the final paper, and participate. Attendance: 10%; Participation: 30%; Final Paper: 60%

ENGL 320 - Postcolonial Literature

ąő˛Ô˛őłŮ°ůłÜłŚłŮ´Ç°ů:ĚýDr. Aaron Bartels-Swindells
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Expected Preparation:ĚýThis course is intended for English majors and minors, as it assumes a basic grounding in the methods of literary studies. However, there are no prerequisites for this course, and it will be broadly useful to students interested in both histories of the novel and the history and fiction of South Africa during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Description:ĚýHow do literary texts respond to oppressive political contexts? How, for example, can fiction describe or affect a society fractured by racial segregation? This class will answer those questions by surveying efforts by twentieth-century South African writers working during the era of apartheid (1948-1994). We will then look at literature of the post-apartheid period (1994-present), when hopes of a “rainbow nation” burst into life but then quickly faded amid growing inequality and political scandal. Throughout the semester, we will ask what effects these massive societal changes have had on South African fiction, and what effects—if any—writers of conscience had on the transformation of a racially unjust society. While plotting this trajectory, we will also reflect on how South African fiction challenges metropolitan histories and theories of the novel. The course will thus explore how South African writers have reconfigured foundational aesthetic categories like realism and modernism and associated social categories like time, subjectivity, and desire in their efforts to represent life under racial capitalism. Students will leave the course with a) a core understanding of the literary history of South Africa; b) a grasp of the history and theory of the novel and its applicability to fiction of the global South; and c) a broad set of critical terms (e.g., realism and modernism) useful for the study of modern fiction generally.

Required texts may include:

  • Sol T. Plaatje,ĚýNative Life in South AfricaĚý(1916)
  • Es’kia Mphahlele,ĚýDown Second AvenueĚý(1959)
  • Nadine Gordimer,ĚýThe ConservationistĚý(1974)
  • J.M. Coetzee,ĚýśŮłÜ˛ő°ěąô˛š˛Ôťĺ˛őĚý(1974)
  • Miriam Tlali,ĚýBetween Two WorldsĚý(1986)
  • ZoĂŤ Wicomb,ĚýYou Can’t Get Lost in Cape TownĚý(1987)
  • Imraan Coovadia,ĚýTales of the Metric SystemĚý(2014)
  • Masande Ntshanga,ĚýThe ReactiveĚý(2014)
  • Johnny Steinberg,ĚýA Man of Good HopeĚý(2015)
  • Various theoretical texts on the history and theory of the novel posted to MyCourses

Evaluation:ĚýIn-class participation; class recaps; oral presentation; one five-page paper; one ten-page research paper.

Format:Ěýł§ąđłžžą˛Ô˛š°ů

ENGL 322 - Theories of the Text

The Work of the Critic

Professor Miranda Hickman
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Fulfills the Theory/Criticism requirement for the major in English

Description: “Criticism is as inevitable as breathing,” T.S. Eliot suggests, enigmatically, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), the essay whose ideas of criticism and creative process exerted major influence on the early twentieth-century modernist moment and beyond. By “criticism,” Eliot means literary criticism and beyond—cultural commentary and critique, designed to register readers’ thoughts and feelings; guide attention; focus thought; identify literary and cultural questions; and respond to and evaluate the texts and ideas of a culture, often toward developing visions for the future.

Eliot’s essay, and the thinking about the activity of “criticism” it represents, reads as the early twentieth-century’s answer to Matthew Arnold’s challenge of the mid-nineteenth century: Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” paved the way for a late nineteenth- and early twentieth century preoccupation with the work of criticism – what role does the commentary associated with criticism, and the figure of the cultural critic, play in the making of culture? How can the critic support what F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson called the development of “critical awareness,” with respect to the texts of a culture? The critic is alternately imagined in the work of this period (sometimes called the “Age of Criticism”) as “sage,” respondent, watchdog, spur, cynic, Virgilian guide, curator, judge, jester, and rhapsode.

Contemporary cultural historian John Guillory, in Professing Criticism (2022), recognizes the importance that the practice of criticism has held for the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and acknowledges that in the field of English, when people teach “literature,” in fact they are often teaching criticism. Taking a cue from Guillory and theorists such as Terry Eagleton - whose The Critical Revolutionaries (2022) will provide points of departure - this course traces a genealogy of criticism as we have inherited the concept, focusing especially on examples from the eighteenth-, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries that have shaped our contemporary conception of what criticism entails and does.

Texts: Early readings include essays by Coleridge, Carlyle, and Arnold; the late Victorian aesthetic criticism of Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde; and twentieth-century work by a range of twentieth-century critics invested in the challenge of reimagining “criticism” for the needs of a modern era – such as Eliot, I.A. Richards, Q.D. and F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, and Northrop Frye. We close by considering a range of later and recent work from critics committed to the “work of the critic” such as Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, Merve Emre, and Zadie Smith.

Format: Lecture and Discussion

Evaluation: 3 brief critical essays and projects (15% each); longer critical essay (20%); final examination (25%), participation (10%)

ENGL 326 - 19th Century American Prose

Fiction After the Civil War: Regionalism, Urbanism, Internationalism

Professor Peter Gibian
Winter 2025
Time TBA

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

Description: A mid-level survey of later-19th-century prose fiction forms representing a wide range of literary movements and modes. The course will be organized to trace ever-widening geographical, literary, and cultural horizons. A first unit will explore “regionalist” or “local color” writings (by authors such as Irving, Harris, Harte, Twain, Chopin, Jewett, Cable, Chestnutt, and Alcott) rooted in the specificity of a unique geographical place that is seen to define a unique cultural or psychological identity. The second course unit will survey classic writerly responses to the late-19th-century city—seen (in authors such as Chopin, Alcott, Dreiser, James, and Wharton) as a new sort of humanly-constructed, hybrid environment or economy in which diverse strangers from a variety of homes and backgrounds are brought together to work out forms of coexistence. The final unit will then follow another group of turn-of-the-century writers as they expand American horizons even further, reflecting the nation’s move into the international arena with new fictional treatments of the International Theme. Authors such as James and Wharton ground their writing in the ever-shifting experience of cross-cultural travel and meditate anxiously on the situation of the writer as “cosmopolite”--perfectly placed (or dis-placed) to explore the problems and possibilities of inter-national interchange in a modern, globalizing world.

Texts (Tentative; editions TBA): To be selected from authors noted in the description above. Readings will include not only short stories but also several longer novels; the amount of assigned reading will be fairly substantial—especially at the end of the semester.

  • A collection of short stories—available in pdf on myCourses.
  • Alcott, Little Women;
  • Dreiser, Sister Carrie;
  • Wharton, The Age of Innocence;
  • Levine, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature (10th ed., Vol. C).

Evaluation: (Tentative): 25% mid-term exam; 25% term paper; 10% class attendance and participation; 40% formal final exam. (NB: All forms of evaluation in this course—on exams as well as essays—test abilities in literary-critical writing and analysis; there will be no short-answer or multiple-choice exams graded by computer.)

Format: Lectures and discussions.

ENGL 329 - English Novel:19th Century 1

Reading the Multiplot Novel in the Age of AI

Professor Yael Halevi-Wise
Fall 2024
M/W 14:30-16:00

Description: This course will make use of Open AI tools to explore the role of minor characters in multiplot English novels written in the first half of the 19th Century. By focusing on minor characters, we will acquire a better understanding of the architectonics of complex literary creations. As a new experiment in literary analysis we will also investigate whether AI tools are presently capable of achieving an accurate and deep assessment of literary artworks created by sophisticated human imaginations addressed to sophisticated readers. Minor characters may seem to play a superfluous role in the plot of a novel, but their presence offsets a narrative’s main concerns and outlines its architectonic composition. On a parallel track we will inquire whether the present generation of AI tools are minor and superfluous for literary analysis or can they sharpen literary analysis by offering refreshing modes of research, brainstorming and essay composition.

Note: This course requires fast paced reading of long and complicated novels. Shortcuts will not work because the assignments build on a comparison between traditional reading and various types of shortcuts.

Texts:

Available at Paragraph Bookstore corner Sherbrooke/McGill College

  • Emma (1815) by Jane Austen
  • Jane Fairfax (1990) by Joan Aiken
  • Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily BrontĂŤ
  • Barnaby Rudge (1841) by Charles Dickens
  • Tancred (1847) by Benjamin Disraeli

Evaluation: 10% discussion and workshop participation; 10% attendance; 10% x4 short essays; 10% x4 revisions of essays using AI tools.

Format: Lecture, workshops, discussion

ENGL 331 - Literature Romantic Period 1

Love and Global Romanticism

Professor Carmen Mathes
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Description: Romanticism is a philosophical and literary movement; the Romantic era is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical period. The meanings, scope and timelines associated with both these statements have been oft debated and contested, particularly when it comes to Romantic-era Britain’s global reach.

This course situates British Romanticism in a global context, and it does so by thinking about love. At a time of imperial and colonial expansion, how did Romantic novelists and poets think about the potentials and pitfalls of love? What kinds of connections—or animosities, or fantasies, or projections—might love bring to the surface or, alternatively, stifle, reject, or repress? We will read three novels (by Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and an anonymous author) and many poems by writers including Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Blake, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron.

Texts:

  • The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Literature, edited by Joseph Black et al., Broadview, 2016, ISBN: 9781554811311
  • Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814), edited by Claudia L. Johnson, Norton Critical Edition, ISBN: 978-0-393-96791-3
  • Annonymous, The Woman of Colour, edited by Lyndon J. Dominique, Broadview, 2007, ISBN: 9781551111766
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Edition, edited by Nick Groom, Oxford University Press, ISBN: 9780198840824

Format: Lecture and discussion

Evaluation: In-Class Essay (20%); Bibliography (10%); Literature Review (25%); Final Research Essay (40%); Attendance and Informed Discussion (5%).

ENGL 333 - Dvlpmnt of Canadian Poetry 2

Professor Robert Lecker
Winter 2025
Time TBA

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

Description: This is a course about really reading poetry, in this case, Canadian poetry. It focuses on a group of approximately ten Canadian poets who have formed and responded to the Canadian literary landscape since World War II. Most of the poets covered in the course are writers who confront modern and contemporary ideas about the nature of self, society, sexuality, gender, and art, but we also look at the ways in which these writers are trying to deal with the existential implications of new views about science, religion, and the poet’s place in a rapidly changing world. Since part of the reading involves thinking about aesthetic and theoretical issues, the course will deal with these issues, just as it will pay close attention to the meaning and resonance of particular poems. At the same time, it will consider the ways in which these poets (and us, as readers) construct the place called Canada as a metaphor that’s central to our daily lives. Students are encouraged to explore multi-media material related to each poet in question. The writing component of the course (a series of short assignments and a final paper) is designed to improve interpretive abilities and writing skills; the course encourages personal forms of critical expression. For this reason, this course will appeal to students who wish to broaden their understanding of poetry in general and will provide new ways of thinking about how poetry works. Students enrolling in this course should be prepared to participate actively in class discussion.

Texts: TBD.

Evaluation: A series of short assignments (50%); final paper (25%); attendance (10%); participation (15%).

Format: Lecture and discussion.

ENGL 335 - The 20th Century Novel 1

Postwar British Novel

Professor Allan Hepburn
Fall 2024
T/Th 4-5:30

Description: This course will focus on British fiction written between the Second World War and the end of the twentieth century. This survey of selected novels will focus on class, the Welfare State, responses to the war, housing, planning, conceptions of the future, the status of children and refugees, evil, women, gender, the decline of imperialism, sexuality, and fictional technique. Generic conventions of comedy and tragedy as they mix with novelistic representation will inform lectures, as will distinctions between mass-market and highbrow fiction.

Texts:

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

Prerequisite: students should have 2 or 3 prior courses in English literature, preferably survey and poetics

Format: lecture and discussion

Evaluation: essays, attendance, participation, final exam

ENGL 342 - Introduction to Old English

From Beowulf to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Old English Chronicles

Dr. Antje Chan
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Prerequisite: None

Description:ĚýThis course explores the significance of Old English for the history of the English language and its literature. Britain before the Norman Conquest produced a language and literature marked by invention and innovation, unravelling moments of change and migration. Around 650, Britain and Ireland comprised early English dialects such as Irish, Welsh, Pictish, Old Norse, and Latin. Languages and cultures throughout the two islands mingled and clashed amidst competing kingdoms. From Germanic peoples before 600s, to Viking and Danish raiders, rulers, and settlers, as well as a community of Jews, Britain was shaped by movements of migration and change. Questions of identity and belonging were at the forefront of the literature.

By developing skills for translation, literary, cultural and historical enquiry, this course looks at a wide range of literary forms, such as lyrics, riddles, epic narrative, hagiographies and chronicles in order to enrich our understanding of the first 600 years of the English language.

Texts (provisional):

  • The Dream of the Rood
  • The Battle of Maldon
  • The Wanderer
  • The Wife’s Lament
  • Beowulf
  • Judith
  • Ælfric’s Life of St Edmund
  • Bede’s account of the poet CĂŚdmon
  • Old English Riddles from the Exeter Book
  • Saint Æthelthryth (from Ælfric’s Lives of Saints)
  • Saint Eugenia (from the Old English Martyrology)
  • J. R. R. Tolkien, The Annals of Valinor (selection)

Evaluation (provisional): participation 10%; translation portfolio 20%; midterm assessment 20%; final assessment 50%

Format: Lectures and discussions

ENGL 345 - Literature and Society

Literary Institutions

Professor Alexander Manshel
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Description: This course will introduce students to a range of thinkers invested in how literary texts come to be. Rather than focus on the individual talent or overarching historical forces, we will take up what James English has called the “middle zone of cultural space.” This is the zone of agents, publishers, translators, booksellers, prize committees, university English departments, creative writing programs, canon warriors, Goodreads, Amazon, and Oprah. Pairing critical readings with novels and short fiction, we will investigate the central institutions, figures, and forces that mediate contemporary literary production and reception. Who are the “unacknowledged legislators” of the literary field, and how do they come between writer and reader to shape what each can and should do? What forces influence our conceptions of aesthetic value, and how is literary prestige measured and doled out? How do literary texts circulate within a culture, and how have they travelled across national and linguistic boundaries? In all, students in this course will encounter a variety of critical and artistic texts that do not rely on the concept of “literariness,” but rather investigate how such a thing is produced in the first place.

Texts: Percival Everett, Erasure (2001); Clayton Childress, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel (2017); R.F. Kuang, Yellowface (2023); Various readings available on myCourses.

Evaluation: Lecture Attendance and Discussion Participation (10%); Paper #1, 4-5 pp. (20%) and Paper #2, 4-5 pp. (20%) [OR, with permission: Final Paper, 8-10 pp. (40%)]; Midterm Exam (20%); Final Exam (30%).

ENGL 347 - Great Writings of Europe 1

Virgil and Ovid

Professor Maggie Kilgour
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Prerequisite: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university courses in English or classical literature. A basic knowledge of Homeric epic will be assumed in lectures. Students therefore should read the Iliad and the Odyssey before taking this course. Previous work on poetry is also strongly advised.

Description: This course will focus on the writings of Virgil and Ovid, their relationship to the Augustan period, and their enormous influence on later Western literature. The two Roman poets seem to present contrasting models for the poet’s relation to society broadly and to political power specifically. For Virgil, poetry appears to be a means of binding society together; for Ovid, it is a means of taking it apart critically. While we will spend most time looking at their epics, The Aeneid and Metamorphoses, we will also study the development of both authors through their different works, and discuss the significance of their decisions to explore the specific genres of pastoral, georgic, elegy, and epic. The writers’ antithetical career paths leading to distinct epic visions offer alternative images for later writers of what it means to be a poet. By looking at the two writers together, however, we will also consider the complex intertextual dynamics between their two positions, noting especially how Ovid intensifies as well as rewrites Virgil’s exploration of desire, exile and alienation, and of the function of poetry itself.

Format: Lecture and discussion

Evaluation: In class mid-term, 20%; 10 pp. term paper, 40%; final exam, 30%; class participation, 10%.

Texts: (required texts are available at the McGill Bookstore):

  • Virgil, Eclogues (Penguin); Georgics (Penguin); Aeneid (Vintage)
  • Ovid, The Erotic Poems (Penguin); Heroides (selections); Metamorphoses (edition TBA)
  • Augustus, Res Gestae, and other secondary materials will be posted on MyCourses

Average enrolment: 30 students

ENGL 348 - Great Writings of Europe 2

Arthurian Origins

Professor Michael Van Dussen
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Prerequisites: None

Note: Students who have taken ENGL 348 under a different course topic are free to take this version of the course. Although the course number is the same, the content is entirely different; therefore, these will count as two different courses toward university and program requirements. For English Literature majors, this course counts toward the “backgrounds” requirement.

Description: The Arthurian legends grew to become an extremely rich and diverse body of literature by the later Middle Ages, and the idea of Arthur continues to fascinate today. Having emerged in the fifth and sixth centuries, tales about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table have since spread across six continents and dozens of languages. They have inspired fictional stories, blockbuster movies, and historical study internationally. Further, they touch upon many fields of study including literature, history, and archaeology. Our goal in this course is to examine this phenomenon as it developed in the medieval period (to ca. 1500) and explore some of the reasons why the Arthurian legends have become so integral to multi-cultural and interdisciplinary pursuits.

Over the course of the semester, we will engage the Arthurian legends by investigating how their central themes, figures, and literary situations change across different linguistic and cultural traditions and periods, as well as how they became central to Welsh, English, and French identities. Where is the line between fact and fiction in Arthurian legends? What constitutes an Arthurian legend? Why do the legends occupy such an important place in the literary and cultural imaginations of medieval writers and readers? How and why are medieval notions of “courtly love” and “chivalry,” as exhibited in the Arthurian legends, important to readers in later social and historical contexts? How are Arthurian stories rewritten or adapted by various authors, and how do these different texts represent the concerns or preoccupations of different historical moments?

We will read most texts in modern English translation, though some 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 class sessions.

Texts (Provisional):

  • The Mabinogion (selections)
  • Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain (selections)
  • Gildas, On the Ruin of Britain (selections)
  • Ps-Nennius, History of the Britons (selections)
  • ChrĂŠtien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances (selections)
  • Robert de Boron, Joseph of Arimathea; Merlin; Percival
  • The Quest of the Holy Grail
  • Marie de France, Lais
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
  • The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle

Contextual readings and short romances from other traditions

Evaluation (provisional):  Final assessment: 40%; Short analytical essays: 50%; Participation and attendance: 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

ENGL 354 - Sexuality and Representation

Queer Screens/Queer Scenes: Risk, Resistance and Revolution

Professor Alanna Thain
Fall 2024
T/TH 16:00-17:30

Description: "Queer Screens/ Queer Scenes" looks at the world making practices of queer media through risk, revolution and resistance. This class is largely focused on film and video, but with consideration of television, digital media, installation and performance, with works drawn from LGBTQ2IA+ perspectives. We will explore topics such as the links between sexualities and representation, subversive and clandestine portrayals of queer sexualities, the emergence of gay and lesbian cinema in the 1970s alongside civil rights movements, the ongoing HIV/ AIDS epidemic and the media, the New Queer cinema of the 1990s, experimental film and video, pornography, , activist documentary, queer aesthetics and the social, political and cultural contexts of production, exhibition and reception. What is queer cinema today and how it is in dialogue with historical and contemporary conditions of production, reception and analysis alongside the changing status of the idea of “queer”? Screenings will include films from multiple world cinema contexts, and will include features, documentaries and experimental/ underground cinema. We will also engage and attend Montreal based festivals, production and queer media communities to consider how cultural conditions of reception and circulation also produce and sustain queer media.

Texts: Films will include numerous short form media, as well as feature films. Attendance at class screenings is mandatory.

Evaluation: TBD.

Format: Lecture, screenings, discussion and participation.

ENGL 355 - The Poetics of Performance

Professor Sean Carney
Fall 2024
M/W 13:05-14:25
Leacock 212

Pre- or Co-requisite: ENGL 230

Limited to students in the English Major Concentration, Drama and Theatre Option

Course Description:

This course examines how meaning and significance emerge in theatrical art. Beginning from the assumption that theatre, like all art, is a form of communication, our study examines the qualities unique to theatrical communication in all its forms. The course is a combination of practical analysis of play scripts and theatre, and consideration of theoretical texts.

Commencing with Aristotle, we interrogate the premises of his Poetics and the marginalization of opsis (spectacle) in his study.

The rest of the course is composed of a series of units: our first unit examines theatrical communication with an emphasis on the dramatic text and how the text may be broken down into minimal communicative units of action.

Our second unit moves from the practical study of a script to the analysis of live theatre with an emphasis on how meaning emerges in the spectable. We will consider both theoretical ideas about theatrical signs and theatre semiotics, and also practical tools for analyzing theatre.

Our third unit examines the function of the actor on stage and how the actor’s performance creates meaning and significance in theatrical communication. We also consider the dynamic relationship between humans and objects in the theatre, such as puppets or stage props, and what these elements tell us about the experience of theatre as a whole.

Finally, our fourth unit opens us to broader questions about communication in the theatre: the implications of theatre as storytelling, the importance of the spectator’s experience of the theatre as the locus of meaning, and the function of stage and theatre spaces in theatre art. As a case study we will consider the contemporary example of Verbatim theatre. The overall goal of the course is to give you a foundational understanding of key theories of the poetics of performance, so that you may build upon this knowledge through your later studies as Theatre and Drama majors.

Instructional Method: Lecture and class discussion

Evaluation: TBA

Texts (Critical Readings and Plays): TBA

ENGL 356 - Middle English

Fifteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Professor Michael Van Dussen
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Prerequisites: none

Note: For English Literature majors, this course counts toward the “Middle English” requirement.

Description: The fifteenth century in England was a dynamic time when concepts of authorship, communication, textual production, and literacy were undergoing tremendous change. English was developing quickly as England’s official language—something that hadn’t been the case for centuries, following the Norman Conquest—now overtaking French and Latin. Heresy and its suppression met with a burgeoning humanist movement, and mainstream religious practice was vibrant and varied. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the medieval invention of printing with movable type coexisted with a lively manuscript culture in England.

This course situates fifteenth-century English literature in its dynamic cultural contexts, examining how late-medieval literature in England intersected with developments in politics, popular culture, literacy, religious controversy, technology, and gender relations. Readings will range from a devout woman’s defiant memoir to a bureaucrat’s struggle with anonymity; from a legalistic dream vision to romantic treatments of the outlaw Robin Hood. We’ll analyze the explosion of fifteenth-century dramatic production and culminate with Thomas Malory’s sophisticated re-imagining of Arthurian romance traditions during the Wars of the Roses. Students will also get to see original medieval manuscripts and early printed texts during workshops with items from McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections.

All primary texts will be read in the original Middle English, though no previous knowledge of the language is required. Portions of several classes will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English.

Texts (Provisional):

  • Thomas Hoccleve, My Compleinte and Other Poems
  • John Lydgate, The Temple of Glass
  • Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur
  • The Book of Margery Kempe
  • Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales
  • Selections from collections of medieval drama

Evaluation (provisional): Final assessment, 30% ; Close reading exercises, 10%; Analytical essays, 40%; Rare Books response, 5%; In-class translation, 5%; Participation and attendance, 10%

šó´Ç°ůłž˛šłŮ: Lectures and discussions

ENGL 357 - Chaucer

Troilus and Criseyde

Dr. Antje Chan
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Prerequisites: None

Note: We will read Chaucer in the original Middle English, however no previous knowledge of the language is required. Time in class will be spent developing proficiency in Middle English.

Description: At the beginning of Geoffrey Chaucer’s life (1340s), Europe was undergoing a period of social change in the wake of the Black Death. Global trade networks across the continent and beyond the Mediterranean facilitated cultural exchanges more than ever before. The literature produced and circulated in Chaucer’s lifetime was profoundly marked by an exchange of ideas rooted in classical, Italian, French and Middle Eastern sources. This admixture of ideas manifested in multilingual manuscripts, engaged with international political, religious, and cultural concerns. As the son of a wine merchant, and a man involved in the English wool trade, Chaucer was deeply shaped by the exchange of things and ideas between England and the continent. It is in such setting that Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde was written.

This course will delve deeply into Troilus and Criseyde, which was considered for centuries after Chaucer’s death his masterpiece. While the poem tells the story of Troilus’ twin sorrows: his lovesickness and his despair both caused by his love for Criseyde, we will explore this poem of unusual psychological depth by considering questions such as how do we live; how porous is the nature of identity; the equivocacy of privacy/secrecy; notions of causality; as well as literary questions such as what does it mean to write fiction; how does one achieve literary authority; and what are the conventions of the art of love and of writings about love?

Texts (provisional):

  • Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde (Norton or Riverside)
  • Boccacio, Il Filostrato
  • Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid
  • Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
  • Boccacio, The Decameron (selections)

Evaluation (provisional): participation and attendance 10%; short essays 20%; term paper 40%; final assessment 30%

Format: Lectures and discussions

ENGL 359 - The Poetics of the Image

Professor Ara Osterweil
Winter 2025
Class Meeting: T/Th 11:30-13:00
Mandatory Screening: M 18:00-20:30

Expected Preparation: This course is intended for students in the Cultural Studies stream. It is a required course for Cultural Studies majors, and should be ideally taken in the term after the student has taken Introduction to Film Studies and Introduction to Cultural Studies, although this timeline is not required. This course can also potentially count towards the World Cinema minor, provided that the student has not taken too many other courses in the English department.

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

Lectures will be illustrated by copious examples. In addition to lectures, there is a mandatory screening every week as well as several discussion sessions led by a Teaching Assistant throughout the semester.

šó´Ç°ůłž˛šłŮ: Two lecture/ discussions per week, one mandatory screening per week, and occasional writing workshops led in additional conference time with the Teaching Assistant.

Evaluation:  Participation (10%); Attendance (10%); 2-page diagnostic essay (20 %); 4-5 page Sequence Analysis (25%): 4-5 page Sequence Analysis (25%)

Art and films by:

  • Andy Warhol
  • Cindy Sherman
  • Dorothea Lange
  • Hollis Frampton
  • Chris Marker
  • Paul Mpagi Sepuya
  • Jean-Luc Godard
  • Sergei Eisenstein
  • Ingmar Bergman
  • Carl Theodor Dreyer
  • Maya Deren
  • Stan Brakhage
  • Yoko Ono

Required Texts:

  • John Berger, Ways of Seeing
  • Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
  • Additional Essays available on MyCourses.

ENGL 360 - Literary Criticism

Professor Sandeep Banerjee
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Description: This course will explore several topics that are central to modern and contemporary literary criticism and critical theory. These include, but are not limited to, representation, narrative, interpretation, ideology, signification, discourse as well as categories of difference such as class, race, gender, and sexuality. We will read excerpts from key texts from a range of critical thinkers, schools and practices to interrogate and engage with some of the fundamental that have animated literary studies: What constitutes literature? Who determines what texts mean, and how? How do texts relate to broader social structures? Considering these questions will necessitate careful and patient engagement with critical texts that will on occasion be dense and difficult.

Note: This is a required course for students of the Literature Honors stream. All other students should contact me for permission to register.

Texts:

  • Terry Eagleton – Literary Theory: An Introduction

Readings from works by specific theorists will be provided.

Evaluation: Take home exams and papers.

Format: Lectures and discussion.

ENGL 363 - Studies in the Hist of Film 3

American Film of the 1960s

Professor Ara Osterweil
Fall 2024
Class Meetings: M/W 16:00-17:30
Mandatory Screening: M 18:00-20:30

Prerequisites: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with concepts and terminology from film studies and cultural studies will be useful. Background in history is also helpful but not required.

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

Format: Lecture, discussion, mandatory weekly screenings

Evaluation: Class Participation (10%); Attendance (10%); Midterm Exam (20%); Final Exam (30%); Final Paper (30%)

Required Films:

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

Readings include:

  • Martin Luther, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
  • Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”
  • Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp”
  • Richard Dyer, “Monroe and Sexuality”
  • “The Black Panther Manifesto”

As well as excerpts from:

  • Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
  • Joan Didion, The White Album
  • Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage
  • J. Hoberman, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties
  • David James, Allegories of Cinema
  • When the Movies Mattered: The New Hollywood Revisited, ed. Jonathan Kirshner & Jon Lewis
  • Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
  • Irwin Unger, The Sixties
  • Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol

ENGL 365 - Costuming for the Theatre 1

Instructor: Catherine Bradley
Fall 2025
TR 10:05-11:25

Prerequisite: None, although permission of the Instructor is required.

Description: Emphasis is on costume design for the theatre, and the development of the various tools used to communicate design concepts. Weekly design modules focus on tools such as script analysis, colour palette, developing a design concept, transformation of characters, design stylization - all focused on the creation of original costume designs.

The concepts covered in class will be practiced by students in weekly skill building exercises, culminating in individual final projects. The main communication tool is sketching, using each student’s medium of choice, such as water colour paints, design markers, coloured pencils, or digital tools. It is not critical to be proficient at sketching – it is more important to have creative ideas and the motivation to communicate visually, but also verbally, and in written form.

The various homework exercises and projects will take a steady amount of time throughout the semester and will culminate in a final project.

Evaluation:

  • Weekly at-home exercises. The details given here are examples only. Content may vary.
  • Design Concepts, Colour Palette, Developing Base Costumes, Stylized Period, Future & Fantasy, Innovative sourcing for period costumes.
  • Participation – attendance, participating in discussions, contributing ideas, participation in workshops – 10%
  • Final project – Independent costume design which integrates all learning modules into one final creative endeavour. The assignment is based on a script of the student’s choice.
  • Final project grade value: 30%

Format: lectures, demonstrations, collaborative learning processes, and artistic exercises.

Readings:

  1. Midsummer Night’s Dream, by William Shakespeare – any version
  2. Free choice – sci-fi or fantasy novel or short story for Future & Fantasy Worlds project
  3. Free choice – play script for Final Costume Design project

Enrollment: 10 students, by permission of the Instructor.

Art Supplies: Art supplies are needed by the second week of class. Important note: any or all art supplies can be replaced by the use of a graphics program and stylus if you prefer to work digitally and have your own program.

ENGL 366 - Film Genre

Horror Film

Professor Ned Schantz
Winter 2024
Time TBA

Description: This course will introduce students to the versatility of horror and pose the question of its ongoing adaptability. It will unfold in three units. The first and last units involve the question of the monster and the sheltering, threatening, atmospheric spaces it approaches or inhabits. Sandwiched between those considerations will be a central unit on horror feelings, which we will attempt to complicate. No longer will we be content to judge simply whether a horror film is “scary;” instead, we will explore the genre’s production of a broad palette of feeling, including key neighbours of fear such as disgust, anger, and shame. Indeed, even fear itself might be usefully divided into slow dread and fast panic (which is one reason why the speed of zombies matters). It is ultimately this rich interplay of response, in dialogue with the longstanding critique of the monster, that will help us more fully articulate the genre’s corresponding socio-political work, including its importance for feminism, queer theory and critical race theory. Possible films include The Shining, The Haunting, It Follows, Babadook, Get Out, and Parasite.

Text: Coursepack

Evaluation: three short assignments 55%, class notes 5%, term project 30%, participation 10%

Format: Lecture/discussions and weekly conferences

ENGL 367 - Acting 2

Professor Sean Carney
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Limited enrollment. Permission of instructor required. Admission to the course will be by application. See questionnaire below.

Description: TBA

Format of class: Warm-ups; discussion; improvisation; movement and voice exercises; physical theatre techniques; scene work; oral presentations.

Evaluation: TBA

ENGL 370 - Theatre Hist: The Long 18th C

Professor Fiona Ritchie
Fall 2024
Time TBA

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

Description:ĚýAn overview of dramatic forms and theatrical practice in Britain from the Restoration through the eighteenth century to the Romantic period (c. 1660-1843). Note that this term we will study the period in reverse chronological order (Romantic to Restoration). The course is divided into four chronological units encompassing the development of stage spectacle, the age of Garrick and the professionalisation of theatre, the rise of morality and sentiment in drama, and the reopening of the professional theatre and the advent of the professional actress. Each unit will cover the theatrical conditions of the period and will examine a representative play staged at the time. Emphasis is placed on the plays as theatrical works rather than literary texts. Students will be asked to conceptualise performances of the plays as they might have taken place in the long eighteenth century and how these performances might have been received. We will also analyse historical documents to explore themes such as genre, acting style, audience experience, theatre architecture, financial practices, regulation of the stage, and company management. We will work with McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections to complete a series of hands-on workshops and assignments with a collection of playbills from the period. This will allow us to deepen our understanding of theatre in the long eighteenth century through the study of print culture.

Texts:

  • Textbook: Peter Thomson, The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
  • Coursepack containing the following plays (tentative): Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677); Richard Steele, The Conscious Lovers (1722); David Garrick and George Colman the Elder, The Clandestine Marriage (1766); Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Pizarro (1799), plus a selection of historical documents for context.

Evaluation (tentative): participation 10%; production journal 20%; playbill assignment 30%; take home final exam 40%

Format: lecture, discussion, group work, work with rare books and special collections

ENGL 371 - Theatre Hist: 19th to 21st C

US Popular Entertainments, 1820-1940

Professor Katherine Zien
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Description: This course explores representations and constructions of U.S. national identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular theatre and entertainments. As the nation experienced industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changing sexual and gender norms, and violent cultural and racial conflicts in the afterlife of Trans-Atlantic slavery and Indigenous genocide, popular entertainments attracted mass audiences and created spectacles of national inclusion and othering. Units on blackface minstrelsy, “Indian plays,” vaudeville, social dance, and other popular form address antebellum and post-Emancipation stagings of race; frontier spectacles; freak shows and penny museums; imperialism; and the complexities of social inequity in the Golden Age/Progressive Era. Through discussions and lectures, we will consider the place of the “popular” – in its classed, ethnic, racial, gendered, erotic, commercial, and hegemonic valences – in forging styles of U.S. citizenship and belonging that persist to the current day, albeit often in camouflage.

Texts: All texts will be provided via MyCourses.

  • Play texts (including Metamora; The Octoroon; Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
  • Films (including The Jazz Singer; Ethnic Notions)
  • Online secondary sources including texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Andrew Erdman, Susan Glenn, Saidiya Hartman, Julie Malnig, Nadine George-Graves, Esther Kim Lee, Robert Rydell, Jayna Brown, SanSan Kwan, Tria Blu Wakpa, and S.E. Wilmer, among others.

Format: Lectures and discussions

Evaluation: In-class participation: 10%; midterm exam: 30%; short response essays: 30%; research paper: 30%

ENGL 372 - Stage Scenery & Lighting 2

Instructor TBA
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Learn theatre production skills and put them into action on the English Department theatre production as an integral part of the production team. Work in various aspects of a backstage running crew. Learn practical skills through hands-on work in the theatre. Students form teams that develop and build a particular element for the departmental production (e.g., set, props, stage management, lighting, sound, etc.).

In addition to 3 in-class hours per week, students will build and run the Department of English mainstage show. This requires an additional 6 hours per week at a minimum, beginning February 2025, to: maintain scene-shop equipment; prepare the stage for the scenery set-up; building the set; setting levels for lights and sound; rehearsals; performances of each show; and strike (taking down the set). Attendance at these scheduled times is a mandatory and graded element of the course.

Learning goals include proficiency in the following:

  • Basic Technical Theatre Skills e.g. safety procedures, knots, climbing ladders, rigging, working with the fly system, etc.
  • Architecture of Different Theatres and their Properties
  • Learning to read and draft Technical Drawings for a Set Design
  • Basic Theatrical Lighting Techniques
  • Basic Electrics
  • Basic Carpentry
  • Team-work

Evaluation

  • 20% Class participation (2% deducted for each missed class and 1% for lateness of 5 min. or more)
  • 20% In-class tests, Projects, and Research Project
  • 60% Production Assignments
    • 20% Production Hours
    • 20% Work on Show
    • 20% Production Binder

ENGL 376 - Scene Study

Immersive and Interactive Theatre

Professor Ned Schantz
Winter 2024
Time TBA

Description: This experimental course will approach immersive and interactive theatre (and related activities such as alternate reality games and live action role playing) from a design standpoint. I will arrive in class next January with the skeletal framework for a strange new theatrical experience. Keeping key principles in mind, we will flesh out this framework together, designing performances, narrative, and mechanics with an eye toward a real event. Both actors and non-actors are welcome.

Texts: Practical readings by Josephine Machon, Jason Warren, Brian Upton, Tracey Fullerton, and others.

Evaluation: discussion participation 10%, portfolio of contributions 70%, reflective essay 20%

Format: Discussion and workshops

ENGL 377 - Costuming for the Theatre 2

ąő˛Ô˛őłŮ°ůłÜłŚłŮ´Ç°ůĚýCatherine Bradley
Winter 2025
Arts B60
TR 10:35-12:25

Expected Preparation: None required.ĚýBy permission of the instructor only.Ěý Please contact catherine.bradley [at] mcgill.caĚý

Description:ĚýCostuming for the Theatre II builds on skills acquired in Costuming I, including costume construction techniques, and developing efficient costume production techniques. There are two main learning modules in advanced costuming: Technical Sewing, and Draping. Sewing skills that were gained in the first semester will be built upon through specific practical exercises, and by costuming the English Department Mainstage production (TDC). Draping techniques will be practiced on half-scale mannequins and will culminate in a themed project.Ěý

More information will become available as the Winter semester theatre production plans are solidified.Ěý

Required Texts:ĚýOne selected play script (TBA).ĚýĚý

šó´Ç°ůłž˛šłŮ:  Learning through doing. Demonstrations, lectures, hands-on learning, and practical projects, experiential learning. Class time + time spent in the atelier on practical projects.Ěý

Evaluation: ĚýIn-class participation, script analysis, hands-on projects, backstage experience (to be confirmed)Ěý

Class size: 10 studentsĚý

ENGL 380 - Non-Fic Media: Cine. TV. Radio

Cinema

Professor Trevor Ponech
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Prerequisite: None.

Description: ENGL 380 is an opportunity to think in depth about the art of nonfictional cinema. We’ll investigate the ways in which and the reasons why nonfictional movies differ decisively from fictional ones. The differences between these two mega-categories mainly have to do with the particular ends and effects that makers design their movies to achieve. Fictional and nonfictional movies can be very similar to one another in many interesting respects. Both categories are, of course, full of works manifesting virtuoso and imaginative uses of the cinematic medium’s characteristic tools and practices. And both contain many examples of makers presenting stories in ways apt to arouse viewers’ emotions and challenge them intellectually. Yet beyond such similarities are myriad differences between fiction- and nonfiction-makers’ expressive, cognitive, and artistic projects.

Evaluation: Brief written assignments, term paper.

Format: Lectures, discussions, screenings.

ENGL 390 - Political and Cultural Theory

Black Feminist Theories

Professor Amber Rose Johnson
Fall 2024
13:00-14:30
EDUC 211

Description: This course will trace the development of black feminisms from the mid nineteenth-century to the present—with the focus largely on contemporary Black feminisms from the 1970s to today. Central to our exploration will be the analysis of the intersectional relationship between theory and practice, and between race, gender, class, and sexuality. Focusing on black women’s political struggles in the US and Canada (in addition to some engagements with the Caribbean) we will consider: The significance of transatlantic slavery to contemporary Black experiences. The ways that Black women have been subject to and resisted racism, sexism, homophobia, and economic oppression. And the ways that Black expressive cultures—visual art, literature, poetry, film, etc.—challenge dominant constructions of Black identity formations. Readings, viewings, and listenings may include: Anna Julia Cooper, Patricia Hill Collins, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Jamila Woods, Morgan Parker and Dionne Brand.

Texts:

  • Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
  • Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks

Evaluation: Participation (10%), Short Writings/Reflections (30%), Mid-term paper (30%), Final Essay or Creative Project and Reflection (30%)

Format: Lecture and class discussion

ENGL 391 - Spec Top:Cultural Studies 1

Girlhood Cinemas: Coming of Age in the Cultural Imaginary

ąő˛Ô˛őłŮ°ůłÜłŚłŮ´Ç°ůĚýAmanda Greer
Fall 2024
MW 08:30-10:00

Description:Ěý

Girlhood cinemas have primarily been discussed via representational analysis, staking moralizing claims by labelling some representations “good,” and others as “bad.” This approach neglects girlhood’s impact on visual cultures, and its entanglements with weighty, near-universal concepts like loneliness, monstrosity, and political anger. Drawing from Fiona Handyside’s observation that “girlhood is a visual construction,” this course insists that girlhood cinemas have their own unique stylistic approaches to coming-of-age narratives, demanding careful formal analysis.

“Girlhood Cinemas” will explore two aesthetic concepts each week in relation to a girlhood film, from traditional understandings of girlhood aesthetics, like cuteness and prettiness, to the less-theorized concepts of quietude and witchiness. A global and intersectional cinema course, we will discuss films from a diverse array of filmmakers and countries, from Indigenous Canadian productions to diasporic Zambian films. Together, we will read works of feminist theory and philosophy, cinema studies, and girlhood studies to build an understanding of how girlhood is stylistically constructed in cinema.

By the end of this course, students will be able to: 1) explicate key aesthetic devices used to portray girlhood in cinema; 2) apply formal reading strategies to complex arthouse and independent film productions; 3) compare and contrast differences across national cinemas using transnational analysis; 4) analyze how intersectional identities shape onscreen girlhoods; and 5) conceptualize novel “aesthetic categories” of girlhood using theories of visual cultures and aesthetics. As a class, we will ask: How is girlhood used around the world as a medium for constructing aesthetic categories and exploring the moral complexities of living?

Texts:ĚýReadings available on myCourses; films available for rent or purchase, or through library services (e.g., Kanopy)

Evaluation:Ěý

  • Discussion and Engagement: 15% (ways to gain marks here include in-class participation, independent reflections, group work, office hour attendance, online discussion boards, etc.)
  • Film/Scene Analysis: 25% (due October 9th)
  • Major Paper or Project: 30% (due November 20th)
  • Final Examination: 30% (date TBD)

Format: Two lecture/discussion periods per week, plus a screening period (with option to screen at home). Students will be expected to complete the screening and readings ahead of attending class.

ENGL 391 - Spec Top:Cultural Studies 1

Restless Times: Contemporary Biopolitics of Sleep, Rest and Care

Professor Alanna Thain
Winter 2025
TR 11:30-13:00

Description:

Sleep is an experience, and a form of intimacy, that we often don’t trust. We are both experts of our somatic experience of sleep, and yet access to our sleeping selves often relies on the perceptions of human and technological “others.” The stories we tell about our own sleep is undercut by a lack of conscious access to the experience itself--we can only report back from the margins of experience, impacting credibility and expertise even when it comes to our own bodies. Sleep confounds normative epistemologies and forms of control; sometimes the sleep “data” from smartphones or other monitors tell a different story than how we feel. A recently identified sleep disorder--”orthosomnia” (Abbott et al 2017), or “straight sleep” –names how “poor” sleepers attempt to conform to the biometric data of sleep monitors in order to measure up to social norms. Today, sleep is a key site for thinking about the intersections and contradictions of bodies, technologies, labour and desire. The radical vulnerability of sleep and sleepers a perpetual theme of art and philosophy, today requires that we reimagine social forms of care and collective concern for bodies and rest. This seminar examines the sleeper’s relation to the social since the 1970s, as medicalization, metrics, media and monitoring have experimented with the ability to make sleep “actionable” in the service of something other than rest (eg. dream inception, harvesting data, programming or “optimizing sleep”). Especially attentive to how sleep has increasingly become a site of work, we will also look at the critiques and resistances of attempts to exploit our off hours, when we rethink today’s sleep “crisis” through longer histories that sought to control and exploit rest, including plantation slavery, colonialism and care work. We will read recent works exploring the rise of “24/7” cultures, the history of sleep medicine, and aesthetic and political mobilizations around sleep equity, or the uneven distributions of rest and recuperation in society. We will explore how artists, scientists and technologies have sought to make sleep representable, shareable, exploitable and protected. Through late 20th and 21st century theorists and media/performance artists exploring multimedia and intersectional approaches to sleep as a sociable form across minoritarian lifeworlds, we will trace the somatics, politics and aesthetics of sleep’s intimate opacity as the contested terrain of more expansive public intimacies.

Texts:ĚýReadings and screenings may include Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance; Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Somniloquies; JosĂŠ MuĂąoz “The Sense of Watching Tony Sleep”; Cressida Heyes, Anaesthetics of Existence; Julia Leigh, Sleeping Beauty Benjamin Reiss, Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World; Jean Ma, At the Edges of Sleep Gus Van Sant, My Own Private Idaho; Johanna Hedva, “Sick Woman Theory”; Franny Nudelman, Fighting Sleep: The War for the Mind and the US Military; Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalisms and the Ends of Sleep Apitchatpong Weerasthekul, Cemetary of Splendour; Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation; Matthew Wolff Meyer, The Slumbering Masses; Matthew Fuller, How to Sleep; Karen Russel, Sleep Donation.

Evaluation: TBD

Format: Lecture, screenings, class discussion, workshops.

ENGL 394 - Popular Literary Forms

The Historical Novel from Sir Walter Scott to…You!

Professor Yael Halevi-Wise
Winter 2025
T/R 16:00-17:30

Description: Historical Novels became widely influential in the 19th Century as an expression of new attitudes toward national identities. To acquire a deep understanding of this popular literary form, students will design their own Historical Novel in this course, while responding to four variations of the genre and four key scholarly discussions of it. In other words, this course has an academic as well as creative component but note that you are certainly not expected to produce a full-fledged novel at the end of the semester—just an outline and sample chapter along with a detailed discussion of how our readings help you negotiate the genre’s opportunities and pitfalls.

Texts (at McGill’s bookstore Le James):

  • Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
  • A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  • Orlando by Virginia Woolf
  • Avishag by Yael Lotan
  • Coursepack (LukĂĄcs, Ragussis, Shaw, Hutcheon)

Evaluation: 15% class participation; 40% responses to the scholarly readings; 25% outline and sample chapter of a Historical Novel of your own design; 20% critical explanation.

Format: Discussion and literary workshops

400-Level
Advanced Courses

ENGL 400 - Earlier English Renaissance

Elizabethan Romance

Professor Kenneth Borris
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Description: One of the centrally fashionable literary genres of early modern Europe, romance was the most important precursor of the novel, though in many ways different. It was characterized by much narrative variety, multiple plots, open-ended structures, digression, coincidence, fantasy, wonder, and wish-fulfilment; in its uniquely serendipitous version of the world, few social conventions or expectations can be taken for granted. Its major exponents include Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. From around 1575 to 1610, the writing of romance became particularly vibrant in England. Focusing on the diverse expressions of this literary form at this time there, in prose fiction, narrative poetry, and drama, this course should especially interest those attracted to early modern studies, or to the history and development of the novel, or to the theory and history of literary forms. Proceeding chronologically, the course will address texts that epitomize romance’s scope in this period, including the qualitatively best and most influential exemplars, as well as those that were most popular in sales, such as Robert Greene’s, which illustrate the genre’s cultural topicality. So as best to define romance and its interactions with other genres in particular texts that engineer complex generic mixtures, such as Sidney’s and Spenser’s, attention will be given to the theory of literary genres.

Texts

  • Sir Philip Sidney, The New Arcadia, edited by Maurice Evans, Penguin paperback
  • Edmund Spenser, Books I and VI of The Faerie Queene; both Hackett paperbacks
  • William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest; all Oxford World Classics paperbacks
  • Course Reader for ENGL 400, provided as files for each text, on the ENGL 400 MyCourses website, such as Robert Greene’s Pandosto and Menaphon (both short)

Evaluation: term paper, 50%; final exam, 35%; class attendance and participation, 15%

Format: lectures and class discussion

ENGL 410 - Theme or Movement Canadian Lit

Canadian Crime Fiction

Professor Nathalie Cooke
Fall 2024
T/Th 14:30-16:00
Arts 230

Prerequisite: Students should have 2 or 3 prior courses in English literature, preferably survey and poetics

Description: This course will focus on Canadian crime fiction, which has garnered deserved popularity and acclaim on the world stage, its authors seeing adaptations of their work for television and film. By the end of the term, students will be able to identify key components of crime novels, distinguish between different subgenres of crime fiction, read critically to identify narratological elements of the genre, demonstrate familiarity with the crime writer’s toolkit by using it in the service of their own preliminary story outline, and perhaps even follow clues and ignore red herrings to anticipate novelistic outcomes.

Format: Lecture and discussion

Evaluation: in-class participation 10%; journal to include oral presentation components, submitted in increments, 70%; story outline & presentation, 20%.

Texts:

Commentaries on crime writing (including those by Gail Bowen, Raymond Chandler, Alan Goldman, Patricia Gouthro).

Six novels likely selected from those by Gail Bowen [Joanne Kilbourn], Giles Blunt [John Cardinal], Maureen Jennings [John Murdoch], Thomas King [Stumps DreadfulWater], Ann Lambert [RomĂŠo Leduc], Louise Penny [Armand Gamache], Kathy Reichs [Temperance Brennan] & Eric Wright [Charlie Salter]).

Enrollment: 30

ENGL 411 - Studies in Cdn Fiction

Leonard Cohen and P.K. Page

Professor Robert Lecker
Fall 2024
Time TBA

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

Description: In this course we will delve into the multifaceted worlds of two compelling Canadian artist/writers: Leonard Cohen and P.K. Page. Through their poetry, fiction, music, and painting, both address many of the prominent concerns emerging in their era: the morality and purpose of the writer; the nature of spirituality; the impact of the natural world; the possibility of aesthetic transcendence. Cohen often wondered whether he was a metaphor. Or, as he put it, “I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.” Page meditated on the power of creativity: “If we but give it time, a work of art ‘can rap and knock and enter our souls’ and re-align us – all our molecules – to make us whole again.”

Cohen, celebrated for his dual roles as a musician and poet, presents a compelling study in the convergence of literature and popular culture. We will trace Cohen’s literary evolution from the Beat generation to the complexities of celebrity status and its impact on Cohen's life and work, examining how fame shaped his artistic identity and influenced his creative process. In this context, we will experience his poetry, listen to his music, read some of his fiction, and watch a variety of films and videos focussing on different periods in his career. Eventually, at the age of 80, he had to go back on tour to support himself. Cohen had a succinct response to that experience: “I like life on the road. It's a lot easier than civilian life. You kind of feel like you're in a motorcycle gang.”

P.K. Page, often regarded as one of Canada's most innovative and celebrated poets, crafted a body of work that transcends conventional boundaries of poetic form and subject matter. Page's poetry exhibits a remarkable versatility, ranging from traditional verse forms to experimental free verse. And it is often mysterious. Page said that “I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant.” Page’s evolution is marked by the time she spent in Brazil and Mexico, where she turned to drawing and painting. We will look at the paintings she created during this period and consider them as visual expressions of her shifting poetics. Page's poetry grapples with pressing social and political issues, reflecting her commitment to justice and human rights. Whether addressing the legacies of colonialism in Canada, the ravages of war and conflict, feminist aesthetics, or the urgent need for environmental conservation, Page's poetry is marked by a fierce determination to bear witness to the injustices of her time. As early as 1981, she anticipated global warming. For the past two decades, Page's poems have celebrated the planet, but they also remind us of widespread ecological peril. As she wrote in 1990: "Art and the planet tell us. Change your life."

Texts: TBD.

Evaluation: A series of short essays (50%); final essay (20%); participation (20%); attendance (10%).

Format: Seminar (lectures and discussion)

ENGL 414 - Studies in 20th C Literature 1

Critical Race Readings of American Children’s Literature

Professor Camille Owens
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Description: Debates are ongoing in the U.S. about whether various forms of thought described as “critical race theory” should be allowed to enter into children’s literature, textbooks, or classrooms. This seminar troubles the underlying assumptions of this debate—that race is an adult subject, and that childhood has ever been separated from it. As we will explore in this course, children’s literature and culture were key sites for instilling the historical relations of American slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy—and they have also been major sites for challenging the effects and legacies of these histories. In this course, we will examine the dominant literary construction of white American childhood across the late-nineteenth and 20th centuries. We will also study texts that illustrate how black, Indigenous, and Latinx North American people fought to make a place for their children in literary, cultural, and educational spheres. By examining formations of childhood as they vary across historical periods and competing ideologies, we will highlight both the ‘constructedness’ of childhood as a social category, and the literary forms through which childhood has derived coherence and cultural power. From the pictorial primer, to the coming-of-age novel, to contemporary YA graphic literature—to books frequently “banned” from children’s reading—we will advance toward a critical understanding of children’s literature as a major rather than minor category of American literature. Bringing questions of literacy, pedagogy, narrative structure, and social hierarchy together, we will test critical race theories and develop our own. Selected texts may include: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Francis La Flesche, The Middle Five, Jessie Fauset and W.E.B. Du Bois, The Brownies’ Book; Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha, Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; James Baldwin, Little Man, Little Man; Justin Torres, We the Animals, and George M. Johnson, All Boys Aren’t Blue.

Texts (subject to minor change):

  • L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
  • Francis La Flesche, The Middle Five (1900)
  • Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949)
  • Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953)
  • Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1970)
  • James Baldwin, Little Man, Little Man (1976)
  • Justin Torres, We the Animals (2011)

Format: Seminar

Evaluation: participation (10%), weekly discussion posts (10%) 1 oral presentation (10%), Artifact essay (20%) annotated bibliography (10%), final research or creative project, (30%)

ENGL 415 - Studies in 20th C Lit 2

Colson Whitehead’s America

Professor Alexander Manshel
Fall 2024
Time TBA

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, the meta-slave narrative, and the heist novel (Zone One [2011], The Underground Railroad [2016], Harlem Shuffle [2021]). 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 (nearly) all of Whitehead’s published novels, including the newly-published installments of his “Harlem Trilogy.”

Texts: The Intuitionist (1999); John Henry Days (2001); Apex Hides the Hurt (2006); Zone One (2011); The Underground Railroad (2016); The Nickel Boys (2019); Harlem Shuffle (2021); Crook Manifesto (2023).

Evaluation: 15 pages of Critical Writing (70%), divided across 2-5+ assignments as agreed upon by each student and the instructor; Formal Research Presentation (20%); Seminar Participation (10%)

Format: Seminar

ENGL 418 - A Major Modernist Writer

Elizabeth Bowen

Professor Allan Hepburn
Winter 2025
T/Th 11:30-1:00

Description: Anglo-Irish by birth, Bowen moved constantly between Ireland and Britain, Britain and the US, and on occasion to Italy, France, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Canada. Her fiction reflects experiments in modernist technique as well as her cosmopolitan disposition. Mobility is a central preoccupation in her fiction. With examples drawn from both her novels and short fiction, this course will examine Bowen’s thoughts on war, women, land ownership, hospitality, aristocratic privilege, Irish history, civic responsibility, friendship, hotel culture, motherhood, interior decoration, atmosphere, extramarital affairs, and other topics. In her essays, Bowen frequently comments on her contemporaries and their writing: Virginia Woolf, Ivy Compton-Burnett, D.H. Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, Guy de Maupassant. Essays about style, short stories, the state of the novel will therefore be threaded into the course to widen the parameters of discussion. Part of the course will be devoted to archival materials—letters in particular—that develop understanding about Bowen’s aesthetic and public engagements.

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

Format: Lecture and discussion.

Evaluation: bibliography, essay, attendance and participation, final exam

Texts: Elizabeth Bowen: a selection of short stories and essays; The Last September, Friends and Relations, To the North, The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day

ENGL 419 - Studies in 20th C Literature

Breaking the Sequence: Narrative Interventions in Early Twentieth-Century Experimental Fiction

Professor Miranda Hickman
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Preparation: At least one course at the 200 or 300 level, ideally addressing twentieth-century literature

Description: Early twentieth-century modernist narrative, by writers such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Rhys, often aimed to “break” the “expected sequence,” to borrow a phrase from the collection of modernist experimental women’s writing. Often writers were re-thinking narrative sequencing toward formal innovation, seeking narrative strategies to represent sensitively the passage of thought and consciousness, designed to gain more sensitive purchase on what Woolf called the “quick of the mind” and the “places of psychology.” Many sought new narrative techniques that have subsequently been recognized as versions of “stream of consciousness.” Others, such as Dorothy Richardson and Gertrude Stein, in tandem with formal experiment per se, sought to critique and write their way beyond expected sequences and scripts in the culture - associated with the marriage plot and what Adrienne Rich would later call “compulsory heterosexuality”; with “Bildung,” or concepts of education, formation and development; and with cultural scripts ascribing roles to women and men. Some, such as H.D. and Bryher, and Ralph Ellison, aspired actively to intervene in fictions of development – such as the Bildungsroman or the related genre, the °­Ăź˛Ô˛őłŮąôąđ°ů°ů´Çłž˛š˛Ô, and the normative cultural assumptions – about construction of identity, gender and sexuality, racialized positionality, class - underwriting these genres and which they helped to sustain. This course considers a range of such “narrative interventions,” construed in several senses – both efforts to reimagine language and narrative form for different ways of understanding modern life, individuals, and communities; and to revise understandings of the narratives and plots according to which individuals and communities form their senses of identity, history and visions for the future.

Texts (Tentative):

  • Anand, Mulk Raj, Untouchable (1935)
  • Bryher, Two Selves (1922)
  • Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (1953)
  • H.D., HERmione (1926-27)
  • Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
  • Joyce, James, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
  • Larsen, Nella, Passing (1929)
  • Richardson, Dorothy, Pointed Roofs (1915)
  • Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Orlando (1928)

Format: Lecture and Discussion

Evaluation: Brief responses (10%); 2 briefer critical essays (4-5pp., each 20%); creative project (4-5pp., 15%); longer essay (7pp., 25%); participation (10%)

ENGL 422 - Studies in 19th C American Lit

The Emergence of the Modern American Short Story through the Long Nineteenth Century

Professor Peter Gibian
Winter 2025
Time TBA

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

Description: Intensive study of a diverse range of shorter prose fictions produced by American authors—mainly over the course of the long nineteenth century, but culminating in close readings of some of the classic short stories produced in the early twentieth century, and ending with a quick look at some contemporary case studies that develop and test the potential in earlier models. Rather than tracing a singular evolution of the short story mode, we will explore a variety of authors whose works test the possibilities of the short form in very different ways. Each of these writers discovered early on that the short story is not simply a miniaturized novel but operates as a literary vehicle with its own distinctive powers and limitations. After an introductory review of recent scholarly work on the theory of the modern short story, and on the history of its development, we will survey a selection of foundational and influential short fictions that reveal the short story’s uses in relation to myth, romance, and the fantastic; to uncanny plots about ghosts and haunting; to evocation of suppressed emotional or psychic states; to representation of neglected cultural identities; to the impulses of regionalism; to urban experience; to crime and detection; and to self-reflexive interrogations of fictional form itself. Indeed the short story has often served for thoughtful and ambitious American writers not only as a simple form with which they could begin their literary training but as a privileged site for self-conscious experimentation with new modes of imagery, new subject matter, and new narrative techniques. Though it may sometimes be seen as minor, low-brow, and popularizing, always hidden in the shadow of the high art of the Great American Novel, the short story in fact frequently functions as a rarefied realm for serious ideological and formal critique—a testing-ground for the most advanced critical and self-critical thinking by American writers. We will focus on the foundational works of authors selected from the following list: Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Harte, Twain, Cable, Chesnutt, Gilman, Chopin, Jewett, James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Anderson, Porter. More contemporary case studies may include works by authors such as O’Connor, Updike, Cheever, Salinger, Baldwin, Diaz, Mukherjee, Lahiri, Paley, Kincaid, Carver, Ohlin, Saunders, Egan, and Davis.

Texts: Course-pack collections of a wide range of short fiction

Evaluation (Tentative): Attendance and participation in discussions, 15%; series of 3 brief textual analyses, 15%; two critical essays, 20% each (or one extended research paper, 40%); take-home final exam, 30%.

Format: Some framing lectures—but emphasis on multi-voiced seminar discussion.

ENGL 431 - Studies in Drama

Latin American Theatre

Professor Katherine Zien
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Prerequisites: None

Description: This course surveys modern and contemporary drama, theatre, and performance art from across the Western hemisphere, with special focus on Latin America, the Hispanophone Caribbean, and US Latinx communities. As we move geographically through the hemisphere, we will learn about the political, cultural, social, and economic factors informing theatrical production. Thematic concerns include: theatre against dictatorship in the Southern Cone and beyond; migration and exile; indigeneity; political theatre in the “borderlands;” gender and sexuality; populism, protest, and “Theatre of the Oppressed;” histories of collective creation in the Americas; and expressions of Latina/o North American identities. The course will be taught in English; all texts will be provided in English translation.

Texts: Our syllabus will feature plays and multimedia works by artists including:

  • Carmen Aguirre (Chile/Canada)
  • Lola Arias (Argentina)
  • Sabina Berman (MĂŠxico)
  • Enrique Buenaventura (Colombia)
  • NĂŁo Bustamante (USA)
  • Guillermo CalderĂłn (Teatro en el Blanco, Chile)
  • Carmelita Tropicana (Cuba/USA)
  • Migdalia Cruz (Puerto Rico/USA)
  • Nilo Cruz (Cuba/USA)
  • FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya) (Chiapas, MĂŠxico)
  • MarĂ­a Irene FornĂŠs (Cuba/USA)
  • Coco Fusco (Cuba/USA)
  • Griselda Gambaro (Argentina)
  • Guillermo
  • Astrid Hadad (Mexico)
  • LEGOM (Mexico)
  • Antonio Machado (Cuba/USA)
  • Mujeres Creando (Bolivia)
  • Teatro Campesino (USA)
  • Teatro LĂ­nea de Sombra (MĂŠxico)
  • Violeta Luna (MĂŠxico)
  • Teatro Malayerba (Ecuador)
  • Teatro Oficina (Brazil)
  • Juan RadrigĂĄn (Chile)
  • JosĂŠ Rivera (Puerto Rico/USA)
  • Jesusa RodrĂ­guez and Liliana Felipe (MĂŠxico/Argentina)
  • Guillermo Verdecchia (Argentina/Canada)
  • Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (Peru)

Additionally, we will utilize the following foundational texts:

  • Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend, Eds. Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theatre and Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2008).
  • Ana Puga, Ed. Spectacular Bodies, Dangerous Borders. Latin American Theatre Review Books (University of Kansas Press, 2011).

Secondary sources by scholars including Natalie Alvarez, Francine A’Ness, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alicia Arrizón, Stuart Day, May Farnsworth, Jean Graham-Jones, Paola Hernández, Larry LaFountain-Stokes, Jill Lane, José Muñoz, Ana Puga, Rossana Reguillo, Ramón Rivera-Servera, Leticia Robles, Camilla Stevens, Diana Taylor, and Tamara Underiner.

Evaluation: Group Presentation: 10%; short response essays: 40%; final analytical/research paper: 30%; in-class participation: 10%; question forum: 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

ENGL 437 - Studies in Literary Form

The Sonnet

Professor Paul Yachnin
Winter 2025
T/Th 16:00-17:30
Ferrier 456

Description: Shakespeare’s Sonnets are at the heart of our work in the course. What is a sonnet, what does it do with language, what does it do to and for us? We will start with Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with how they took life from their Italian precursors, especially Petrarch, and from a number of English innovators, and how they grew larger in a kind of dialogue with sonnet-writers such as Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney. The early modern literary field is foundational (including Donne and Milton for example), but it is not by any means the end of our work. We will range far and wide in our study of this amazing way of making our language speak in new ways—from the Romantics, the Victorians, and up to our own time. And, of course, and since it is has wandered far afield, we will not restrict ourselves to the Sonnet in England.

There is no prohibition against the use of ChatGPT and/or similar AI systems in the course.

Texts: TBD

Format: Lecture and discussion

Evaluation: Journal (25%); Individual presentation (15%); Short essay (based on individual presentation) (15%); Group presentation (15%); Participation (10%); Oral exam (20)

ENGL 438 - Studies in Literary Form

Text, Nature, World: Literature and the Environmental Imagination

Professor Sandeep Banerjee
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Description: Raymond Williams reminds us that the idea of “nature,” though typically contrasted from human activity, “contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.” Williams’s statement underlines the fact that humans have intervened in external nature from the earliest of times to transform it and the ways in which we live in nature. This course will focus on a range of literary texts to examine their environmental imagination. It will draw out how the texts imagine the environment and, just as crucially, the interaction between human beings and external nature, and between humans and non-humans. It will also situate these texts in relation to theorizations of the production of nature and space as well as to the broad and uneven terrain of ecocriticism and environmental criticism. Considering these questions will necessitate careful and patient engagement with critical texts that will on occasion be dense and difficult.

Possible Texts (to be finalized later):

  • Amitav Ghosh – Gun Island
  • Peter Matthiessen – The Snow Leopard
  • Jamaica Kincaid – A Small Place
  • Indra Sinha – Animal’s People
  • Gita Mehta – A River Sutra

Selections from the poems of Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, Arun Kolatkar.

Selections from theoretical and critical texts.

Evaluation: Take home exams and papers.

Format: Lectures and discussion.

ENGL 444 - Studies in Women Authors

Women’s Voices in Medieval Literature

Dr. Antje Chan
Fall 2024
Time TBA

Prerequisites: None

Description: The Middle Ages is a period of literary history which is often considered as scarce in terms of women’s writings. However, medieval understandings of literature, authorship, textual circulation, and processes of writing do not fit neatly into later periods’ conceptions. For example, modern notions of authorship have often been reductive when considering women’s writings in the Middle Ages. Women’s voices permeated medieval literary culture, not only as writers, collaborators through amanuenses, translation, or adaptation, but also as patrons, manuscript owners, readers, and subjects of texts. By adopting a nuanced understanding of the production and reception of texts, one can discern a rich and vibrant picture of women’s participation in the literary culture of the Middle Ages.

From Marie de France, Bridget of Sweden, and Catherine of Siena, to Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Christine de Pizan, this course considers a wide range of women’s voices, unveiling a multifaceted and collaborative literary culture where women’s influential views formed and transformed ideas of writing, reading, and gender.

Texts (provisional):

  • Marie de France, Lais (selection)
  • Marguerite Porete, Mirror of Simple Souls
  • Bridget of Sweden, Liber Caelestis (selection)
  • Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue
  • Julian of Norwich, Revelations
  • Christine de Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies
  • Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe
  • The Paston Letters (selection)

Evaluation (provisional): participation and attendance 10%; short essays 20%; term paper 40%; final assessment 30%

Format: Lectures and discussions

ENGL 456 - Middle English / MDST 400 - Interdisc Sem:Medieval Studies

Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Late-Medieval English Literature

Professor Michael Van Dussen
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Prerequisites: None

Note: For English Literature Majors, this course counts toward the “Middle English” requirement.

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 drew on 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 (ca. 1350-1500). Some sessions will be spent working with original medieval manuscripts from McGill’s Rare Books and Special Collections, as well as the Osler Library of the History of Medicine. 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, Canterbury Tales: The Prioress’ Tale; The 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
  • Historical source readings

Evaluation (provisional): Analytical reading journal: 30%; Research proposal: 10%; Final research project: 35%; Translation exercises: 10%; Participation: 15%

Format: Seminar and workshop

ENGL 460 - Studies in Literary Theory

Race and Literature – From Medieval to Modern

Instructor: Dr. Aaron Bartels-Swinells
Winter 2025
Time TBAĚý

Description: TBA

Texts: TBA

Format: TBA

Evaluation: TBA

ENGL 461 - Studies in Literary Theory 2

Eros, Confession, and Self-Construction in Autobiography and the Novel

Professor David Hensley
Fall 2024
MW 10:05-11:25
Arts 230

Expected Preparation: ĚýAlthough there are no strict prerequisites for enrolling in this seminar, some prior university-level study of literature is recommended.

Description: ĚýThis 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 °ä´Ç˛Ô´Úąđ˛ő˛őžą´Ç˛Ô˛ő 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 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). (The list of texts and editions is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in September 2024.)

  • ąĘąô˛šłŮ´Ç, The Trials of Socrates (Hackett)
  • ąĘąô˛šłŮ´Ç, Plato on Love Ěý(Hackett)
  • Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations Ěý(Oxford, Penguin, or Hackett)
  • Saint Augustine, Confessions Ěý(Hackett or Oxford)
  • Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova Ěý(Oxford or Penguin)
  • Benvenuto Cellini, My Life  (Oxford)
  • Michel de Montaigne, Essays Ěý(Hackett)
  • Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (Broadview)
  • Denis Diderot, The Nun Ěý(Oxford or Penguin)
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther Ěý(Norton or Penguin)
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, °ä´Ç˛Ô´Úąđ˛ő˛őžą´Ç˛Ô˛ő Ěý(Oxford or Penguin)
  • Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Broadview or Norton)

 ˇĄąš˛šąôłÜ˛šłŮžą´Ç˛Ô:Ěý 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 medical problems or other personal emergencies arise.

Format: ĚýSeminar.

ENGL 467 - Advanced St in Theatre Hist

Cleopatra: Race, Gender, Sexuality, Power

Professor Paul Yachnin
Fall 2024
M/W 13:00-14:30
Arts 230

Description:ĚýShakespeare’s play, Antony and Cleopatra, is the living centre of this course. The character of Cleopatra will come to us first and foremost from Shakespeare’s play, but we will meet her also in the poetry of Augustan Rome, in Plutarch, Chaucer, in the work of modern historians, and in a wonderful range of visual images. We will bring into our discussions recent critical work on race, gender, sexuality, and power in Shakespeare studies. The central line of our work will take us again and again back to the theatre—to Cleopatra in works by John Dryden, George Bernard Shaw, and Michel Tremblay as well as a TBD selection of more recent adaptation.

You will be reading, writing, talking, and presenting about Cleopatra, but you will also sign up to do a group performance of scenes from a play on the course.

There is no prohibition against the use of ChatGPT and/or similar AI systems in the course.

Texts: We will use the Oxford edition of Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill. Other texts TBD.

Format: Lecture and discussion

Evaluation: Journal (30%); Individual presentation (15%); Participation (10%); Group performance/presentation (15%) Oral exam (30%)

ENGL 469 - Acting 3

Voice and Embodiment for the Theatre

ąő˛Ô˛őłŮ°ůłÜłŚłŮ´Ç°ůĚýKirsten HawsonĚý
Fall 2024

Voice and Embodiment for the Theatre is a practical course designed to accommodate performers of all levels, from beginners to those with more experience. The course focuses on liberating the voice through physicality while providing students with transferable skills for presentation and communication.

Students will explore multiple voice and speech techniques, including Linklater, Fitzmaurice, Houseman, Rodenburg, and Knight-Thompson Speechwork (KTS), alongside movement disciplines such as Laban, Viewpoints, Alexander Technique, and myofascial release. These methods aim to free the body and release the voice. Characterization will be investigated through engaging, embodied exercises, focusing on understanding power dynamics and status.

Please note: This is a physical class involving significant movement and rigorous vocal exercises. If you have accessibility needs, please contact the instructor. Everyone is encouraged to enrol, and accommodations will be made to support all students.

ENGL 479 - Philosophy of Film

Professor Trevor Ponech
Fall 2024
F 11:30-14:30

Prerequisite: None

Description: This seminar will focus on a selection of topics central to the philosophical study of cinema, especially those having to do with the perennial question, “What is cinema?” In responding to this question, we will engage with a variety of ongoing debates and seemingly intractable puzzles having to do with the nature of cinema, the specificity of cinematic artworks, and the distinctive aspects of our experiences of works of that kind. Topics to be discussed include: theories of representation and illusion, linguistic and semiotic theories, authorship, categories of cinematic expression and art, differences between cinematic and literary narration, cognitive approaches to cinema studies, and cinema’s possible contributions to philosophy.

Evaluation: One short written assignment and a term paper; seminar participation.

Format: Lectures, seminar discussions, screenings.

ENGL 490 - Culture and Critical Theory 2

Professor Richard Jean So
Winter 2025
Time TBA

Description: The “Digital Humanities” is a new and growing field of research within the humanities. It brings together the humanities and sciences and it takes many different forms. The version of “DH” that we will focus on in this class is the use of computers, statistics and data to study literature and culture. In particular, the main goal is to teach students how to program in Python – a common programming language – to implement standard computational and statistical methods to analyze small and large corpora of literary and cultural texts. At the same time, students will read important critical studies and applied examples of computational criticism to reflect on the limits and affordances of what they are learning, as well as to discover (and potentially implement) useful models of literary text-mining.

Readings: One week before each class, students will be emailed a “Python notebook” which will provide all of the computer code that we will be learning the following week. These “notebooks,” in aggregate, represent the de facto textbook of the course. Scholarly readings will similarly be distributed via email a full week before that reading is due for class.

Data: In later weeks, I will provide sample data (small to medium sized corpora of novels, poems, and online data) to facilitate our lessons. All data will be out of copyright (i.e., texts published before 1923) or open access (i.e. Fanfiction online stories, Reddit posts) and can be freely shared.

Grading: Each week, starting week 1, there will be a problem set. The problem set will be coding-based problem-solving using Python. Each problem set will be due the night before the next week’s class at midnight via email (as a Python notebook file).

Evaluation: Problem set grades: average of all problem sets (90%); Class participation and discussion (10%)

ENGL 495 - Individual Reading Course /Ěý ENGL 496 - Individual Reading Course

Fall 2024/Winter 2025

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.ĚýIntended for advanced and/or specialized work based on an extensive background in Departmental studies.

Application Deadline:

  • Fall 2024 Term: Monday, September 7, 2024 by 4:00 PM
  • Winter 2025 Term: TBD
Application Form
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