平特五不中

Description:听In this course we will survey the 1590s, one of the most remarkable decades in English literary history, one which saw the initial publication of major works by Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Lodge, Greene, Nashe, Deloney, Drayton, Daniel, and Bacon, among others. We will read and discuss examples from popular contemporary poetic genres such as the sonnet sequence, the epyllion, and the pastoral. We will also keep an eye on the theatrical context, studying works by popular playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare and Thomas Dekker. We will follow the decade鈥檚 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 popular print culture, including contemporary news from home and abroad, tales of piracy on lawless seas, and accounts of witchcraft and other strange crimes.

Texts:听Specific texts, and a course-pack of collected texts, will be available at the 平特五不中 Bookstore

Evaluation:听Midterm essay (25%); final essay (35%); final exam (30%); course participation (10%)

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

Description:听This course will canvas some of the 鈥渙rigins鈥� 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 鈥� of the self and its imaginative politics 鈥� 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 鈥渃omic epic in prose.鈥� As the emerging literary 鈥渇orm of forms,鈥� 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:听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, 845-5640). (The list of texts below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in September 2013)

• Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose (Oxford)
• Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d鈥橝rthur (Oxford)
• The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Hackett)
• Michael Alpert, ed., Two Spanish Picaresque Novels (Penguin)
• Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Norton)
• Madame de Lafayette, The Princess of Cleves (Norton)
• Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (Norton)
• Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess (Broadview)
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Norton)
• Samuel Richardson, Pamela (Oxford)
• Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (Oxford)

Evaluation:听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

Average enrollment: 50 students

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

Description:听听This course will study developments in the English novel from the late 1740s until the turn of the century. It will focus on six novels, grouped in three pairs. We shall begin with two first-person narratives: John Cleland鈥檚 erotic, or pornographic, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), followed by Sarah Fielding鈥檚 distinctly non-erotic novel, The History of Ophelia (1760). We shall then turn to two novels of the 1790s which take opposing stands in the 鈥渨ar of ideas鈥� pitting Jacobite aganst anti-Jacobite novelists: Mary Hays鈥檚 radically feminist Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), and Elizabeth Hamilton鈥檚 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), which features a parody of Hays herself. We shall conclude with Matthew Lewis鈥檚 The Monk (1796), the most sensational of the many Gothic novels of the 1790s, paired with Jane Austen鈥檚 witty parody of the Gothic, Northanger Abbey (1817). Attention will be paid to gender issues, as well as to genre, style, and thematic concerns.听

Texts:听

• John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Oxford)
• Sarah Fielding, Ophelia (Broadview)
• William Godwin, Caleb Williams (Broadview)
• Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Broadview)
• Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Broadview)
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Broadview)

Evaluation:听25% mid-term test; 25% final test; 50% term paper (2,000-2,500 words)听

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

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

Texts:听The Course Reader and other texts will be available in paperback for purchase at the Word bookstore, 469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640.

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

Evaluation:听term paper, 50%; take-home final exam 40%; class attendance and participation 10%

Format:听Lectures, discussions, conferences

Average Enrolment: 75 students

Prerequisite: None

Expected student preparation:听Previous university courses in English literature; some knowledge of Renaissance literature or culture is highly useful

Description:听A survey of 17th-century poetry and prose (excluding Milton). In England, the 17th century was a time of revolution; a period marked by social upheaval, religious division, civil war, as well as radical changes in philosophy and science. The literature of the time reflects this turbulence in its vitality and its variety. In this course, we will read representative works by writers including Jonson, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Marvell, Lanyer, Cavendish, Philips, Bacon, Burton, discussing aesthetic developments in the religious, political, and philosophical contexts of the period.听

Texts:听The Broadview Anthology of 17^th Century Verse & Prose (available at 平特五不中 Bookstore)
Other supplementary materials will be posted on WebCT

Evaluation:听Midterm (20%), 12-page term paper (40%), final exam (30%); participation (10%)

Format:听Lecture and discussion

Average enrollment: 40

Prerequisite: None

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

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

Evaluation: Participation (15%), class presentation (10%), midterm paper (25%), final exam (50%)

Format: Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite: None

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

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

Evaluation:听15% participation; 15% Secondary source pr茅cis and presentation; 30% short paper; 40% final exam

Format:听Lecture and discussion

Prerequisite or co-requisite:听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鈥檚 selection of the Literature Major program.

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

Texts:

• Abrams, M.H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 10^th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2012
• Bausch, Richard, and R. V. Cassill, eds. The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Shorter 7^th ed. New York: Norton, 2006
• Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy, eds. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Shorter 5^th ed. New York: Norton, 2005
• Messenger, William E. et. al. The Canadian Writer鈥檚 Handbook. 5^th ed. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP, 2010.听

Evaluation:听Essay 1 (10%); Essay 2 (15%); Essay 3 (15%); Mid-term exam (10%); Formal final examination (30%); Class participation (10%); Short assignments, which may include quizzes, writing and scansion exercises, and recitations (10%)

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average Enrolment: 30 students

Prerequisite: None

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

Description:听This (new) course will engage in a study of a wide range of performance texts, examined not simply as dramatic literature but as works in their original manuscript form, as then transformed by the nature of theatrical performance, and by the meanings generated for them by their popular and critical responses.听 The course will also attend to the material conditions of performance, the work of actors and actresses, actor-managers and actress-managers, designers, musicians, et al, and to the semiotic and sociopolitical significances of the venues and cities, London pre-eminently, in which the productions were first performed, along with a consideration of their theatrical afterlife and the ways in which they served to create a performance repertoire. Some of the playwrights do not often appear in anthologies, if only because their works do not readily lend themselves to the dead hand of canonization or being fitted for the Procrustean bed of generic classification. Among the writers to be studied are George Colman, the Younger, Col. Ralph Hamilton, James Smith, R. B. Peake, George Henry Lewes, Dion Boucicault, T. W. Robertson, B.C. Stephenson, Alfred Cellier, Joseph Addison, Netta Syrett, with a nod to a comical satire by J.M. Barrie and the inclusion of the original text of Paul Potter鈥檚 Trilby, based on the novel of that name by George du Maurier and two texts performed by the Christy鈥檚 Minstrels. The word 鈥淏ritish鈥� in the course title draws attention to the ways in which theatre formed and was formed by the constructions of nation(s) and empire. Passages from the plays will be regularly read out loud to get a sense of their performative dimensions.听

Texts:

• Davis, Tracy C., ed., The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance (Broadview Press, 2012)

Evaluation听(tentative):听Active ongoing participation in the intellectual and creative life of the seminar 15%; one seminar presentation on a theoretical, critical, or historical text or on a case-study 15%; a distilled critical argument arising from the seminar presentation advanced in a 8-page long essay 20%; a 16-page scholarly essay on an individually-negotiated topic 50%

Format: Brief lectures; led-discussions; individual and collective presentations including interrogative Q & As; and mini-performances

Prerequisite: None

Description:听A survey of Canadian and Qu茅becois drama and theatrical institutions from colonial times to the establishment of independent professional theatre in the 20thC. The primary focus of the course will be on the importance of Montreal Anglophone Theatre in the development of Canadian theatre.听 Qu茅becois plays will be read in translation.

Texts:

• Modern Canadian Plays vol. I, course pack.听

Evaluation: 15% Class participation, 15% Oral Research Presentation, 20% Term Paper, 50% Research Project

Format:听Lecture and discussion

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

Texts听(tentative):

• Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler in Four Major Plays vol 1听 (Signet)
• Pollock, Sharon.听 Blood Relations (Newest)
• Strindberg, August.听 Miss Julie (Dover)
• Chekhov, Anton: Three Sisters, in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
• Pirandello, Luigi.听 Six Characters in Search of an Author in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
• Brecht, Bertolt.听 The Good Person of Setzuan (Minnesota)
• Williams, Tennessee.听 A Streetcar Named Desire (New Directions)
• O鈥橬eill, Eugene.听 Long Day鈥檚 Journey into Night, in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
• Beckett, Samuel.听 Happy Days, in Eight Modern Plays (Norton)
• Hansberry, Lorraine.听 A Raisin in the Sun (Vintage)
• Pinter, Harold.听 The Caretaker (Faber)
• Ryga, George.听 The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (Talonbooks)
• Tremblay, Michel.听 Forever Yours, Marie-Lou (Talonbooks)

Evaluation:听First essay: 25%; conference participation: 15%; major essay: 30%; final exam: 30%

Format:听Lectures and conferences

Average enrollment: 80 students

Description:听In this course we will focus only on the first half of Shakespeare鈥檚 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 Henry VI, part 1, The Comedy of Errors, Titus Andronicus, Love鈥檚 Labor鈥檚 Lost, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, before following Shakespeare out of the theatre and into print with the narrative poems 鈥淰enus and Adonis鈥� and 鈥淭he Rape of Lucrece.鈥� We will then join him back at the theatre, where he will write Richard II, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night鈥檚 Dream (world classics of history, tragedy, and comedy) all within the space of about a single year. The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, part one, and As You Like It round out the decade of the 1590s, and our course. The plan is to cover approximately one play per week. Are you Shakespearienced? After this course you will be. The pace will be fast and unrelenting, with a view to giving students in the English major and minor programs a fuller appreciation of the scope of Shakespeare鈥檚 accomplishment in the first half of his career.

Texts: TBA

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

Format:听Lectures

Prerequisite: None

Expected Student Preparation: 听Previous university courses in English literature; some knowledge of Renaissance literature or culture is highly useful

Description:听A study of the poetry and selected prose of one of England鈥檚 most important, influential, and still controversial writers. Though Milton often seems today a powerful voice of literary, political, and even religious orthodoxy, in his own time he was seen as a radical, advocating regicide, divorce, and a freer press. 听His writing is complex and challenging, asking close and active engagement from his readers. In this course we will take up his challenge to see especially how he speaks to current concerns. In the first few weeks, we look at Milton's early poetry and some of his political writings, tracing his development as a poet in relation to the complex social, political, and literary context in England. The main body of the course will focus on a close reading of Paradise Lost. Lastly, we will look briefly at Milton's late works, Paradise Regain鈥檇 and Samson Agonistes, as well as consider Milton鈥檚 legacy in the Western literary tradition.听

Texts: (required texts are available at 平特五不中 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:听on MyCourses
• King James Bible (recommended)

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average Enrollment: 60 students

Prerequisite: None.听Limited to students in English programs.

Description:听This course will survey the emergence of theories and methodologies in European philosophy and scholarship, especially in literary criticism, since the eighteenth century. As a basis for understanding and evaluating the role of "philosophical approaches" in literary and cultural studies, we will compare and contrast several kinds of historical thinking with the distinctive claims of philosophical formalism articulated influentially by Immanuel Kant. The Kantian legacy 鈥� not only its principles of moral and aesthetic autonomy and disinterestedness but also its emphasis on the conditions of knowledge and criteria of judgment 鈥� provides a powerful and continuing alternative to the nineteenth-century revival of dialectical thinking in Hegel, hermenutics, and Marx. Our readings in twentieth-century theory will consider the far-reaching impact of the ideological opposition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism as exemplified by Kant and Hegel. We will examine the history of this opposition as a pattern of methodological assumptions and institutional practices. In particular, we will review the claim that one literary genre 鈥� the novel 鈥� embodies or expresses the characteristic philosophical problems of modernity.

Texts:听The books for this course will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). The following texts will be among those required (please note that Pluhar's translation of Kant is the only acceptable edition!):

• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett)
• Georg Luk谩cs, The Theory of the Novel (MIT)
• Gerald Graff, Professing Literature (University of Chicago)

Evaluation:听Papers (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

Average Enrollment: 60 students

Prerequisite: None
Limited to U2 and U3 students in English programmes

Description:听This course will introduce students to a pair of concepts absolutely fundamental to the study of literature, cinema, theatre, and artistic culture in general: authorship and interpretation.听 We鈥檒l survey the on-going debates over what an author is, and what unique contribution, if any, this agent makes to the artwork鈥檚 meaning as well as other culturally relevant features and effects.听 Likewise, we will inquire into what one is doing when one interprets a work of art.听 In trying to answer this question, the first step shall be to say what an interpretation is, i.e., what differentiates interpretive from other kinds of statements about art.听 Subsequently, we鈥檒l revisit several long-standing puzzles about interpretation: Is a good interpretation necessarily one that tries to grasp the author鈥檚 intentions?听 Can an interpretation ever be true or false?听 When two interpretations of the same artwork conflict, is there ever any good reason to prefer one to the other?听 Does interpretation itself in some sense produce the work鈥檚 meaning?听 Is there any possible justification for blurring the distinction between the author鈥檚 achievements in making an artwork and the interpreter鈥檚 achievements in engaging with that work?听 Throughout our discussions, attention will be paid to the relation of authorship to interpretation within performing arts, such as theatrical and musical presentations, where performers鈥� interpretive activities might arguably be said to bring new works into existence.

Texts:听A representative selection of recent essays within the fields of aesthetic philosophy, literary theory, cinema studies, and performance studies

Evaluation: TBA

Format: Lectures and discussions

Description:听This course will introduce students to postcolonial literatures from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean across a range of representational media. It will examine how postcolonial authors engage with the various legacies of European colonialism in the national and/ or regional contexts. It will also seek to understand how these authors in their works strive to create a distinct (often national) identity for themselves. The course will look at how these authors construct (and challenge) categories of class, gender, race, and nationality. The course will also engage with the question of 鈥淓nglish鈥� in the colonies, and examine in what ways English literary studies in the colony formulated as a project to maintain colonial rule. It will therefore ask how anticolonial actors imagined literature as a means to counter the claims of empire? What critical idioms and comparisons have writers and scholars in the postcolonial world invoked to speak out against entrenched systems of discrimination?听 The broad goal of the course will be to examine ways in which literary culture has engaged questions of empire, nationalism, statehood, and human rights. It will also familiarize students with key concepts and debates in postcolonial studies.

Texts听(tentative):听

• Chinua Achebe 鈥� Things Fall Apart
• Salman Rushdie 鈥� Midnight鈥檚 Children
• N鈥檊ugi wa Thiongo 鈥� Grain of Wheat
• Jamaica Kincaid 鈥� A Small Place
• V. S. Naipaul 鈥� House for Mr. Biswas
• Aime Cesaire 鈥� Discourse on Colonialism
• Frantz Fanon 鈥� Wretched of the Earth (selections)

Evaluation听(tentative):听Participation 10%; book review 20%; midterm 30%; final paper 40%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite:听None. This course is designed for English Majors. Previous course work in U.S. literature will be extremely helpful.

Description:听The American Dream stands at the forefront of the national ethos, informing countless discursive strategies for constructing American identity. On the one hand, the American Dream is an implement of sociopolitical hegemony. On the other hand, it also is structured around a series of intertwined narratives built atop quintessentially 鈥淎merican鈥� ideals such as prosperity, egalitarianism, and unrelenting growth and expansion. But what constitutes the actualization of the American Dream? How do the promises and pressures that accrue around it shape the individual鈥檚 relationship to material society? What kind of persona stands at the centre of the rags-to-riches story? What does it mean to 鈥渕ake it鈥� in contemporary America? This course will open up these questions through analyses of twentieth-century novels that deal centrally with the topic of the American Dream. We will consider how literature complicates and undermines mainstream narratives that promote standardized notions of success. We also will consider some of the issues that demarcate the limits of the American Dream, including racial identity, class conflict, violence, suburban malaise, and mass consumerism. Through our explorations of a diverse range of modern and contemporary prose fiction, we will chart a trajectory in the development, revision, and reaffirmation of the American Dream, from the early-twentieth century to the present day.

Texts:听TBA

Evaluation:听Attendance and Participation: 15%, Mid-Term Exam: 20%, Final Exam: 35%, Final Essay: 30%

Format:听Lectures and Discussions

Prerequisite: None

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

Description:听听A survey of later-19^th-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 鈥渞egionalist鈥� or 鈥渓ocal color鈥� writings (by authors such as Harris, Harte, Twain, Chopin, Stowe, Jewett, Cable, Chestnutt, and Alcott) rooted in the specificity of a unique geographical place seen to define a unique cultural or psychological identity. The second course unit will survey classic writerly responses to the late-19^th-century city鈥攕een (in authors such as Crane, Dreiser, James, and Wharton) as a new sort of hybrid place 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鈥檚 move into the international arena with new fictional treatments of the International Theme. Authors such as James and Wharton (and, in a different way, Du Bois) ground their writing in the ever-shifting experience of cross-cultural travel and meditate anxiously on the situation of the writer as 鈥渃osmopolite鈥�--perfectly placed (or dis-placed) to explore the problems and possibilities of inter-national interchange in a modern, globalizing world.

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

• 听Coursepack of photocopied short stories
• Alcott, Little Women
• Dreiser, Sister Carrie
• Wharton, The Age of Innocence
• James, The Portrait of a Lady
• Baym, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature (8^th ed., Vol. C)

Evaluation听(Tentative): 20% mid-term exam; 25% essay; 15% conference participation; 40% formal, 3-hour final exam. (NB: All evaluation鈥攐n exams as well as essays鈥攖ests abilities in literary-critical writing and analysis; none involves short-answer or multiple-choice exams graded by computer.)

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average Enrollment: 80 students.

Description:听This course surveys the development of Canadian prose fiction from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Reading both short stories and novels, we will study the diverse modes and genres that have attracted Canadian writers, including romance, realism, and modern experimentalism. We will be particularly attentive to the transition from nineteenth-century to modernist forms. All of the works on the syllabus are energized by particular spaces and times. Beginning in Prince Edward Island with Rilla of Ingleside (1919), the most important Canadian account of women鈥檚 experience on the home front in World War I, we will move to Frederick Philip Grove鈥檚 prairie in Fruits of the Earth (1933), Hugh Garner鈥檚 Toronto in Cabbagetown (1950/68), Hugh MacLennan鈥檚 Halifax in Barometer Rising (1941), and back to the prairies, perceived this time through the eyes of Jewish immigrants in Adele Wiseman鈥檚 The Sacrifice (1956), before finally settling in the British Columbia interior of Ethel Wilson鈥檚 Swamp Angel (1954) and Sheila Watson鈥檚 The Double Hook (1959). We will explore how different writers operate within a national context and against an international backdrop, and we will contemplate what makes communities in Canada and what divides them. Students should leave this course familiar with the stories that inspired Canadian writers up to the pre-centennial period, and the prose forms that they used to capture them.

Texts:听

• Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside
• Frederick Philip Grove, Fruits of the Earth
• Hugh Garner, Cabbagetown
• Hugh MacLennan, Barometer Rising
• Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
• Adele Wiseman, The Sacrifice
• Ethel Wilson, Swamp Angel
• Sheila Watson, The Double Hook

Evaluation听(tentative): Short writing assignment 1 (10%), Short writing assignment 2 (15%), Final essay (30%), Participation (10%), Final exam (35%)

Format: Lectures and discussions

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

Description:听A survey of the development of Canadian poetry from the 19th century through the Second World War.听 Our discussion of substantial selections from major authors will explicate the historical and cultural contexts of their works and consider their relation to competing poetic traditions in England and America.听 We will attempt to articulate each poet鈥檚 idea of the Canadian poet鈥檚 special task: among them, skilful imitation; mimesis; cultural nationalism and autonomy; originality; psychological realism; and contemporaneity.听 We will also, necessar颅ily, clarify such period concepts as 鈥淩omanticism,鈥� 鈥淰ictorianism,鈥� 鈥淎estheticism鈥� and 鈥淢odern颅ism,鈥� and their distinctive Canadian manifesta颅tions, as we proceed.

Texts:听

• Gerson, Carole, and Gwendolyn Davies, eds.听 Canadian Poetry: From the Beginnings through the First World War.听 Toronto: McClelland and Stewart [New Canadian Library], 1994.
• Trehearne, Brian, ed.听 Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960.听 Toronto: McClelland and Stewart [New Canadian Library], 2010.

Evaluation:听2 essays, 5 and 8 pp., 20% and 30%; final examination, 40%; Partici颅pation in class discussion, 10% (Please note before registering for this course: I assess active participation in discussion and not attendance.听 Full attendance through the semester without speaking will earn 0/10 in this category and substantially affect your final grade.)听 Evaluation may change depending on class size; if necessary, changes will be announced before the end of the course change period.

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average Enrollment: 25

Description:听The primary goal of this course is to acquaint students with English masterpieces from the second half of the Nineteenth Century and a German bildungsroman influential at this time. While keenly engaged with the spirit of 鈥榩rogress鈥� and 鈥榬eform鈥� sweeping through their country, writers in this period tended to set the action of their novels a few decades back from their time of composition and publication. Keeping this historical perspective in mind, we will focus on how influential novelists such as Goethe and Dickens portrayed their protagonists鈥� struggle for meaningful employment in an increasingly secular and professionalized society that was still hedged in, however, by barriers of gender, class, and religious affiliation.听

Texts:

• The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• David Copperfield 听by Charles Dickens
• Villette by Charlotte Bront毛
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average enrollment: 70 students

Description:听This course will introduce students to the poetry of the Romantic period. We will also cover a selection of Romantic drama. Students will study the works by the canonical poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake while also exploring female writers, such as Joanna Baillie, Letitia Landon, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson. We will familiarize ourselves with Romantic concepts and themes, such as the sublime, the figure of the Romantic wanderer, and the imagination. Lectures will incorporate formal analysis and students will place the works in their social, political, and historical contexts. Looking at Romanticism as a complex movement, we will explore why Romantic drama and the female Romantic writers were excluded from the Romantic canon and to what extent these works can be labeled 鈥楻omantic.鈥櫶�

Texts: The Norton Anthology: English Literature. The Romantic Period. Vol. D. Ninth Edition. Coursepack

Evaluation: Participation (20%); essay 1 (35%); Creative Assignment (10%), Take Home Final Exam (35%)

Format: Lectures and discussion

Average enrollment: 50

Description:听This course focuses on British literature of the later Romantic period, emphasizing its various verse and prose genres. We will devote substantial time to Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, the three poets historically central to studying the period. We will read as well the poetry of John Clare, Felicia Hemans, and anonymous bards. The period's rich prose will be represented by the essays of Thomas De Quincey, Charles Lamb, and William Hazlitt, and by the fiction of Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. Our lectures and discussions will focus on craftsmanship, historical and biographical context, the meaning of 鈥渞omanticism," the figure of the poet, and the relation of genre and gender.

Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period (Vol. D), 9^th edition
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. M. K. Joseph (Oxford World鈥檚 Classics)

Evaluation: 听Participation in class: 15%, Paper 1 (5-6 pages): 30%, Paper 2 (5-6 pages): 30%, Final exam: 25%

Prerequisite: None

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

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

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average Enrollment: 25 students

Description:听South Asians have had a conflicted and ambiguous relationship with the English language. It came to the subcontinent as a language of the colonizers, and became into the 鈥榣anguage of command鈥� of British India, a position it retained even after decolonization. Today, India and Pakistan have the second and third largest populations of English speakers in the world. Importantly, within a few decades of its introduction in the early nineteenth century, South Asians took up English as a literary language to fashion poems, travelogues, and especially novels 鈥� a trend that has intensified in today鈥檚 globalized world. In this course we will examine South Asian Anglophone novels from the nineteenth century to the present. As we read the texts, we will try and understand why the novel has become such a popular form for writers, in addition to inquiring into their key aesthetic and political concerns. We will also pay particular attention to how the authors articulate notions of belonging and alienation, represent the family and the nation, construct understandings of history, and express the ideas of love, friendship, and injustice. We will also engage with how the Anglophone novel engages with issues such as gender, class, race, and caste in their works, besides examining the place of South Asian Anglophone literature within contemporary popular culture of the region.

Texts听(tentative):听

• Mulk Raj Anand 鈥� Untouchable
• GV Desani 鈥� All About H Haterr
• Salman Rushdie 鈥� Haroun and the Sea of Stories
• Amitav Ghosh 鈥� The Calcutta Chromosome
• Mohammed Hanif 鈥� A Case of Exploding Mangoes
• Sarnath Banerjee 鈥� Corridor: A Graphic Novel

Evaluation (tentative):听Participation 10%; book review 20%; midterm 30%; final paper 40%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: None

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

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

Evaluation: Class tests 35%; homework 30%; final project 20%; attendance and participation 15%

Format: Lectures, workshops, discussions

Enrolment: 35 students

Description:听In this course, we consider how Shakespeare, his fellow playwrights, the actors, and the playgoers of early modern London rewrote the rules about who could be a public person and about who could take part in discussions about politics and social policy. Before Shakespeare, commoners (the vast majority of the population) were excluded from debates about matters of political concern. From the 1580s to the closing of the playhouses in the middle of the seventeenth century, the commercial theatre invited people of all social ranks to take an active role in thinking about and talking about a great range of social and political questions. Together, the theatrical practitioners and their customers laid the groundwork for the political culture of modernity.

We will read works by a number of Shakespeare鈥檚 fellow playwrights, a handful of prose works from the period, some modern historical studies, as well as several key readings in political philosophy. But the focus of our attention will be a rich selection of plays by Shakespeare himself.

Texts:听Selected plays by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton; other readings will be provided in electronic form

Evaluation: Reading responses, two short essays, final exam, participation

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite:听None. Limited to English Majors

Description:听This course examines the material circumstances and human mediations which condition the ways in which texts are produced and used. In addition to examining the materiality of print and digital texts, students will gain first-hand experience working with manuscripts in 平特五不中鈥檚 rare book collections. We will attend to the production, circulation, and use of texts broadly conceived鈥攁s objects that are crafted, transacted, read, seen, and so on. One primary concern of the course will be to come to a nuanced understanding of the transition from manuscript to print, and from print to digital media. In what ways are manuscripts and printed texts produced, circulated and read differently? How does the physicality of a text condition interpretation and the making of meaning? How does regard for the material circumstances of textual production complicate notions of authorship and intentionality? Readings will include modern theories of bibliography and editing, as well as theories of the book by medieval and early modern commentators.

Texts:听Course pack听

Evaluation:听Mid-term exam, 20%; Rare books workshops and responses, 10%; Final research project, 30%; Final exam, 30%; Participation and attendance, 10%

Format: Lecture, discussions, workshops

Prerequisite:听None.听

Expected Student Preparation:听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:听This course will focus on the writings of Virgil and Ovid, their relationship to the Augustan period, and their influence on later Western literature.听 While we will spend most time looking at the 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 use different poetic genres. Their different career paths leading to distinct epic visions offer alternative models for later writers. In studying the significance of literary forms, we will necessarily relate them to larger cultural questions, considering the choice of genre, and in particular the use of epic, as a comment on Roman culture and society.

Texts: Required texts are available at the 平特五不中 Bookstore

• Virgil, Eclogues (Penguin)
• Georgics (Penguin)
• Aeneid (Vintage)
• Ovid, The Erotic Poems (Penguin)
• Heroides (selections)
• Metamorphoses (Harcourt and Brace)
• Augustus, Res Gestae,听and other secondary materials will be posted on WebCT

Evaluation:听Mid-term, 20%; term paper, 40%; final exam, 30%; class participation, 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average enrolment: 40

Prerequisite:听No formal prerequisite, but previous (or concurrent) university-level work in literary studies and a familiarity with the basics of literary criticism are expected.听

Expected Student Preparation:听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:听This course explores the imaginative dimensions of the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table in the Middle Ages. We will consider the patterns of development and possible historical origins of the Arthurian myth; the particular historical and cultural events and conditions reflected in Arthurian fictions; and the ideological power the myth of Arthur has held (and continues to hold) as a way of defining the present by glorifying the past.听 While our main interest will lie in the Arthurian literature produced in medieval Britain, culminating in Malory鈥檚 Morte Darthur, we will also read (in translation) Latin chronicles and legendary histories, as well as continental vernacular tales and romance.听

Texts:

• The Romance of Arthur: An Anthology of Medieval Texts in Translation (new, expanded edition), ed. James J. Wilhelm (New York and London: Garland, 1994)
• Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte Darthur: The Winchester Manuscript, ed. Helen Cooper (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998)

Evaluation:听20% mid-term exam, 40% essay (8-10 pages), 30% final exam, 10% class/ conference participation

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite:听None

Expected Student Preparation:听Familiarity with concepts and terminology from film studies and cultural studies will be very useful.

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

Texts:

• J. David Slocum, ed., Hollywood and War: The Film Reader
• Essays by such critics as Thomas Schatz, Lary May, Kaja Silverman, Tania Modleski, Linda Williams, Jean Baudrillard, Garrett Stewart, and others

Required Films:听听听听听听听

• All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930)
• Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941)
• Guadalcanal Diary (Lewis Seiler, 1943)
• The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
• The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967)
• The Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)
• Coming Home (Hal Ashby, 1978)
• Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, 1985)
• Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)
• Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998)
• Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)
• Redacted (Brian DePalma, 2007)

Evaluation:听TBA

Format: Lectures, discussions and weekly screenings

Average enrollment: 50 students

Prerequisite: None

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

We will engage topics including the following:

• Historical debates about the dangers, pleasures, and purposes of theatrical representation
• Changing acting theories and methods
• Approaches to the construction and study of theatrical space
• Theories of reception
• The body onstage: materiality and semiotics
• 鈥楶ositioning performance:鈥� disciplinary relationships between theatre and performance studies

Texts:

• Daniel Gerould, Theatre/Theory/Theatre: The Major Critical Texts from Aristotle and Zeami to Soyinka and Havel. NY: Applause, 2000
• Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works. NY: Theatre Communications Group, 1995
• A course packet including primary texts (Marina Abramovi膰, Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Augusto Boal, Anne Bogart, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Brook, Edward Gordon Craig, Denis Diderot, Jerzy Grotowski, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Femi Osofisan, Sophocles, Wole Soyinka, Konstantin Stanislavski, Zeami) and secondary sources (Rhonda Blair, Dwight Conquergood, Colin Counsell, Mark Fortier, Helen Gilbert, Gay McAuley, Jacques Ranci猫re, Joseph Roach, Richard Schechner, Diana Taylor, Philip Zarilli)

Evaluation: In-class participation: 20%; critical theatre review: 20%; short response essay: 20%; midterm exam: 20%; final take-home exam: 20%

Format: Lectures and group discussions

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

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

Texts听(tentative):

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

Evaluation听Mid-term exam, 25%; Final exam, 35%; Final essay, 30%; Participation and attendance, 10%

Format: Lectures and discussions

Prerequisites: No formal prerequisite, but previous (or concurrent) university-level work in literary studies and a familiarity with the basics of literary criticism are expected

Description:听While Chaucer is best known today for his last major work, the Canterbury Tales, his literary reputation before the modern period rested more prominently on his earlier works: the playful dream-visions, the courtly lyrics, and the grand love-epic Troilus and Criseyde.听 Chaucer鈥檚 early poetry differs greatly from the Canterbury Tales in style and subject matter, but it is equally revolutionary from the standpoint of literary history: it proved that the previously humble English vernacular could match the refinement of French courtly poetry, the grandeur of Italian humanism, and the sophistication of learned Latin discourse. This course explores how Chaucer鈥檚 pre-Canterbury Tales poetry both absorbed a range of European influences and created something specifically 鈥淓nglish鈥� and distinctly 鈥淐haucerian.鈥�

This course has two overlapping goals: 1) to place Chaucer鈥檚 early poetry in the context of the literary, cultural, and socio-historical milieux in which Chaucer moved as a court poet during the tumultuous late-fourteenth century; 2) to trace Chaucer鈥檚 highly self-conscious development as a writer in the early to middle phases of his literary career鈥攁 process that figures crucially in the development of the very concept of English authorship.听 We begin by acquainting ourselves with Chaucer鈥檚 鈥渓ibrary鈥� by reading some of his own favorite books in translation (Boethius鈥檚 Consolation of Philosophy and parts of Guillaume de Lorris鈥檚 and Jean de Meun鈥檚 Roman de la Rose) and discussing his literary influences. We then sample Chaucer鈥檚 lyrics and two of his dream-visions (Book of the Duchess and House of Fame); then we devote a substantial period of time (approximately half the semester) to a close reading of Troilus and Criseyde, the work that many critics consider Chaucer鈥檚 masterpiece.听 We conclude by reading part of Chaucer鈥檚 collection of erotic 鈥渟aints鈥� lives,鈥� the Legend of Good Women鈥攁 controversial poem that both retracts Troilus and looks ahead to the Canterbury Tales.听 All Chaucer readings will be in the original Middle English; no prior experience with Middle English is necessary, though learning it will be a formal expectation of the course.听 听听

Texts:

• Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Barry Windeatt. Original spelling edition. Penguin, 2003.
• Geoffrey Chaucer, Dream Visions and Other Poems, ed. Kathryn L. Lynch. Norton Critical Edition, 2006.
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard Green. Dover, 2002.听

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

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Description:听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-sc猫ne, 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.听 In addition to numerous close-reading exercises, we will be supplementing our investigation of images with several classical texts on photography and film, by theorists such as John Berger, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Laura Mulvey, Andre Bazin, Kaja Silverman, and Mary Ann Doane.听 Students must come to class prepared with all of the assigned reading, and will be expected to participate verbally in class on a weekly basis.

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

Texts:听Selections from

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

Art and Film by:

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

Evaluation:听Attendance and participation 15%; mini-paper 20%; two small papers (first worth 25; second worth 35) 60%; section assignments 5%

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Prerequisites:听听At least 3 credits of ENGL 200, 201, 202, or 203. Students need to have taken or be co-registered for ENGL 311. This course is designed explicitly for U2 English Honours students.听

Description:听This course examines several influential topics in literary criticism and theory, including but not limited to: close reading; the role and status of the author; canon formation; class, race, gender, and sexuality; systems of signification; hegemony and subversion; politics; and performativity. To further our understanding of these topics, we will read and analyze major works from modern and contemporary schools of thought, including: New Criticism, Marxism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Psychoanalysis, and New Historicism. By comparing these movements, we will unpack some of the central debates that have shaped the development of literary theory.听 One of our main objectives will be to interrogate the role literature plays as a producer of meaning, aesthetic value, identity, intention, and political engagement. At the same time, we also will consider the forces of production that demarcate the place of literature in contemporary society. Addressing these issues will require close attention to a range of theoretical criticism. The willingness to read and reread complex and difficult writings will be essential for students taking this course.

Texts: TBA

Evaluation: Attendance and Participation: 15%, Mid-Term Exam: 20%, Final Exam: 35%, Final Essay: 30% 听 听 听 听

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Prerequisites:听 None

Expected Student Preparation:听Familiarity with concepts and terminology from film studies and cultural studies will be very useful.

Description:听This course will survey U.S. cinema during what we might call the decade of Reagan. Indeed, critic Andrew Britton diagnosed the special effects-laden blockbusters that had displaced the more politically and aesthetically adventurous American filmmaking of the 1970s as examples of 鈥淩eaganite entertainment,鈥� which acclimated its audience to the military adventurism and 鈥渁uthoritarian populism鈥� of the Reagan administration. But the 1980s also saw the birth of a series of 鈥渘ew鈥� independent cinemas (New Queer Cinema, New Black Cinema, etc.), which generated innovative filmic vocabularies of race, gender, sexuality and class to dissent from Reagan鈥檚 political hegemony, as well as the cultural hegemony of Hollywood鈥檚 testosterone-fueled, action-adventure fantasies. Meanwhile, older Hollywood genres (the teenpic, the horror film) were being revamped for a new generation of filmgoers. And of course, the 1980s was the decade in which 鈥減ostmodernism鈥� became a household word. This class will examine all of these developments to trace the ways in which the cinema of this period worked through the political and cultural dilemmas of the period. We will do so while keeping in mind that, as Stephen Prince has observed, the 1980s was the decade in which 鈥渇ilm ceased to be primarily a theatrical medium, based in celluloid鈥� Movies took their place as one 鈥榮oftware鈥� stream among others鈥� merchandised by global media companies who viewed their marketplace as the planet itself.鈥� In other words, the decade also marks a moment in which the definitions of 鈥渃inema鈥� and even the 鈥渘ational audience鈥� underwent dramatic changes.

Texts:听Essays by such critics as Robin Wood, Andrew Britton, Thomas Schatz, Geoff King, J. Hoberman, Fredric Jameson, Jon Lewis, Justin Wyatt, Carol Clover, Douglas Kellner and Michael Ryan, Fred Pfeil, William Warner, Janet Cutler, Jackie Stacey, Stephen Prince, Warren Buckland, Peter Biskind, and others.

Films: (The required films will likely be selected from the following list)

• Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)
• The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981)
• Friday the 13^th, Part 2 (Steve Miner, 1981)
• Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982)
• Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)
• Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
• El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983)
• Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)
• The Brother from Another Planet (John Sayles, 1984)
• Sixteen Candles (John Hughes, 1984)
• Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984)
• Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, 1985)
• Back to the Future (Robert Zemeckis, 1985)
• Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Seidelman, 1985)
• Lost in America (Albert Brooks, 1985)
• Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)
• Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986)
• Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986)
• Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986)
• Down By Law (Jim Jarmusch, 1986)
• Mala Noche (Gus Van Sant, 1986)
• Parting Glances (Bill Sherwood, 1986)
• Working Girls (Lizzie Borden, 1986)
• Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)
• Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989)
• Longtime Companion (Norman Ren茅, 1989)
• Sex, lies, and videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989)
• To Sleep with Anger (Charles Burnett, 1990)
• Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991)

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

Format:听Lectures, discussions and weekly screenings

Average enrollment: 75 students

Prerequisites: None

Expected student preparation:

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

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

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

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

Texts: TBA

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

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

Average enrollment:听10 students, by permission of the instructor

Prerequisites: None

Description:听This course will pursue the idea of 鈥渃lassic鈥� horror not in terms of notoriety or acclaim, but as a way to designate films that articulate a particularly intense set of historical concerns. Most of our films will be more than thirty years old, and many will be in black and white, though by the end we will creep close to the current state of the genre. Divided up into a range of subgenres (the slasher film, the gothic, institutional horror) and special issues (the problem of sound, the horror of film itself), the course will introduce students to the versatility of horror and pose the question of its ongoing adaptability.

Central to our approach will be the complication of affect. In other words, no longer will we be content to judge simply whether a horror film is 鈥渟cary;鈥� instead, we will explore the genre鈥檚 production of a broad palette of feeling, including key cousins of fear such as disgust, humour, and shame. Indeed, even fear itself may 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 that will help us articulate the genre鈥檚 corresponding socio-political work, including its special importance for feminism and queer theory. Possible films include Halloween, Suspiria, The Haunting, Freaks, Night of the Living Dead, and Cure.

Texts: Coursepack

Evaluation:听Film journals 35%; term paper 40%; participation 15%; quizzes 10%

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Average enrollment:听70 students

Prerequisites: ENGL 230 and ENGL 269 and/or permission of the instructor.听 Sign-up sheets for interviews will be posted on the door of Arts 240 the first week of April.听 Please send a letter (of less than one page, double spaced) outlining why you are interested in taking the course and what you would bring to it. E-mail it to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca with the subject heading Clown Mask Class Application.听 It is due 2 days before your interview.

Description:听This course is intended to expand and challenge students physically, creatively and imaginatively through the exploration of clown and mask.听

Texts:

• Why is that so Funny? A Practical Exploration of Physical Comedy by John Wright (New York: Limelight Editions, 2006)

Evaluation:听Class Participation and Attendance; Scene rehearsal and performance; Research Presentation; Journal and Reflection

Format: Lectures, screenings, discussions

Average enrollment:听14 students

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

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

Format:听Workshop demonstrations and practical assignments

Permission of instructor required.

Prerequisites: Please submit ONE of the following in PDF format to the Department of English by August 1st,听 2013 to kathryn.moore [at] mcgill.ca. Late submissions will not be accepted.

• One scene, a two-hander (only two characters), written for the stage, in proper playwriting format, not more than 5 pages.
• 3 pages of fiction, double-spaced, font Times New Roman size 12.
• Three poems.

Description: This creative writing course will help students develop the skills necessary for writing plays. Through the assigned text, selected readings, lectures and workshops, we will focus on how to create characters, how to write effective monologues and dialogue, and how to structure a scene. We will consider conflict and high stakes within dramatic structure. Attention听 will be devoted to what it means to create a specific world for the audience through realism and magic realism, as well as the role of tone and voice in drama. We will also examine the writing process in general. By the end of the course, students will be comfortable writing a full-length play and will learn how to assess, edit and read from their own work with a critical eye.

Required texts:
The Bombay plays: The Matka King & Bombay Black by Anosh Irani
Selected readings compiled by Instructor

Evaluation:
1monologue:20%
1scene: 20%
Feedback given to fellow students: 10%
Readings & Presentations: 10%
Final portfolio or rewritten, polished work: 40%

Format: Interactive lecture and workshop

Average enrolment: 15 students

Prerequisites:听None

Description:听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 fraught cultural and racial contact, popular entertainments attracted mass audiences and created spectacles of national inclusion and 鈥榦thering.鈥� The course comprises units addressing the following themes and forms: racial and reform melodramas; antebellum and post-Emancipation stagings of race (including blackface minstrelsy and abolitionist performances); frontier spectacles (such as Buffalo Bill鈥檚 Wild West); freak shows and 鈥減roprietary museums;鈥� popular dance, vaudeville, and gendered displays; imperialism and world鈥檚 fairs; and the Jazz Age. We will culminate by investigating the Federal Theatre Project as a moment in which popular entertainments were institutionalized to create new contexts merging labor and leisure. In readings supplemented by contextualizing lectures, we will consider the place of the 鈥減opular鈥� 鈥� in its classed, ethnic, racial, gendered, erotic, commercial, and hegemonic valences 鈥� in forging styles of U.S. citizenship and belonging that persist to the current day, often in camouflage.听

Texts:

• Play texts (Metamora; The Octoroon; Uncle Tom鈥檚 Cabin)
• Films (The Jazz Singer)
• A course packet comprising secondary sources by Annemarie Bean, Daphne Brooks, Jayna Brown, Jon Cruz, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jane Desmond, Andrew Erdman, Susan Glenn, Saidiya Hartman, Bruce McConachie, Lisa Merrill, Andrea Most, Ronald Radano, Joseph Roach, David Roediger, Michael Rogin, Robert Rydell, David Savran, Alexander Saxton, and S.E. Wilmer, among others.

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

Format: Lectures and discussions

Average enrollment:听35 students

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

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

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

Prerequisite: None

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

Description:听

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

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

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

Texts:

• Coursepack containing a variety of theoretical essays by Philip Auslander, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler,听 David Savran, Diana Taylor, Rebecca Schneider, Jacques Derrida, Dwight Conquergood, Andrew Parker, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
• Michel Tremblay,听Albertine In FiveTimes, trans. Linda Gaboriau (Talonbooks)
• Georg B蠇chner,听Woyzeck听(Nick Hern Books)
• Federico Garc铆a Lorca,听The House of Bernarda Alba, trans. Rona Munro (Nick Hern Books)
• Lorena Gale,听Ang茅lique听(Playwrights Canada Press)
• Anton Chekhov,听Three Sisters, trans. Paul Schmidt, in听The Plays of Anton Chekhov听(HarperCollins)

Films:

• Baz Luhrmann,听Romeo + Juliet听(Bazmark Films), Baz Luhrmann, director, written by Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce听 (Bazmark Films, 1996 ; Beverley Hills: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, ca. 2002)
• The Wooster Group, director, Elizabeth LeCompte, narrator Kate Valk,听Brace Up!听(The Wooster Group, 2009)
• Werner Herzog, director,听Woyzeck听(Anchor Bay Entertainment,听 ([2000])
• Mario Camus, director, written by Mario Camus and Antonio Larreta,听The House of Bernarda Alba听(1987; [Chicago]: Ci艅emateca, ca. 2005]
• Film Script: Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann,听Romeo + Juliet听-听
  
  

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

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

Description:听Scholar Anne Nothof states: 鈥淭he comfortable myth of the 鈥榗ultural mosaic鈥� is an imaginative construct which reifies the Canadian self-concept of tolerance, freedom, and diversity.鈥� Whereas Canadians may grapple with former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau鈥檚 鈥渋dealist dream鈥� of multiculturalism, this policy differs greatly from attitudes toward cultural integration in the United States, which has not adopted an official policy of multiculturalism despite widespread recognition of the nation鈥檚 immigrant-based composition. How does cultural diversity impact the ways in which artists, scholars, and communities make and interpret theatre and performance? How have U.S. and Canadian theatre and performance practices embodied the promises and challenges of multiculturalism and articulated with official policymaking practices? In what ways do contemporary theatre and performance expose the socially determined and contested parameters and intersections of concepts such as 鈥榗ulture,鈥� 鈥榬ace,鈥� and 鈥榚thnicity?鈥�

This course investigates works of North American theatre that take up questions of cultural exchange and clash, society鈥檚 multicultural 鈥榦thers,鈥� immigration, the contours of the hyphenated identity, and relationships among culture, race, class, gender, and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning in the latter half of the twentieth century, we will consider theatre鈥檚 interventions in wide-ranging debates about cultural politics as shaped by sociohistorical forces of the Civil Rights and feminist movements, cultural nationalism, and Quebec鈥檚 Quiet Revolution. As we engage definitions of intercultural theatre and cosmopolitanism in North American cultural discourses, we will map complex, multilayered cultural milieux in Canada and the United States, including relationships between Francophone and Anglophone theatre artists, Quebec鈥檚 recent immigrant 鈥榦thers,鈥� the place of First Nations groups in multiculturalism, and the permeation of national borders by diasporic and transnational identities. We will supplement our readings with visits to local theatre companies such as MT Space, Teesri Duniya, and the Black Theatre Workshop.

Texts:

• Films (West Side Story, 1961)
• A course packet comprising selected secondary readings by scholars such as Will Kymlicka, Himani Bannerji, Jane Moss, Ric Knowles, Charles Taylor, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Josette Feral, Nancy Fraser, Helen Gilbert, Andrea Most, Angela Pao, Stuart Hall, David Krasner, Yasmeen Abu-Laban, Ann Haugo, and Kim Solga.
• Play texts and performance footage showcasing work by U.S. and Canadian artists such as Lorraine Hansberry, Young Jean Lee, Suzan-Lori Parks, Ntozake Shange, Anna Deavere Smith, Lu铆s Vald茅z, David Henry Hwang, Monique Mojica, Trey Anthony, Djanet Sears, Sarah Jones, Spiderwoman, William Yellow Robe, Tomson Highway, Nilo Cruz, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, August Wilson, Abla Farhoud, Guillermo Verdecchia, Marcus Youssef, and Carmen Aguierre.听

Evaluation (tentative):听In-class participation: 20%; Question Forum Post: 20%; Performance Review: 20%; Analytical Response Essay: 20%; Final Take-Home Exam: 20%

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Average Enrollment: 80

Expected student preparation:

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

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

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

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

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

Texts: TBA

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

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

Average enrollment:听10 students, by permission of the instructor

Description:听In the years before and after the 1967 Centennial, Canadians found themselves fascinated by the history and culture of their country. One response to this fascination was to undertake acts of cultural recovery and recuperation鈥攖hat is, the creative portrayal of historical figures or events in history, visual art, literature, theatre, and media. This course investigates these acts of recovery by thinking about how they have contributed to and complicated our understandings of Canada today. What pasts do we recover and what pasts do we purposely forget? How can we ethically recover a conflictual past? Who has the right to recover which pasts and who can speak for whom? As we address these questions, we will consider cultural theory on topics such as icons and hero worship, 鈥渇reaks鈥� and public life, recuperative literatures, cultural nationalism, feminism, and postcolonialism and indigeneity. The goal of this broad spectrum of theories is to establish many different approaches to literatures and media that have sustained and continue to sustain the ongoing project of writing and revising Canadian culture. The material for the course will be diverse: the famed 鈥淗eritage Minute鈥� segments, newspaper articles, (meta)biography, a graphic novel, political theatre, poetry, memoir, and fiction.

Texts:听(available at The Word Bookstore [cash or cheque only!])

• Carol Shields, Small Ceremonies
• Mark Abley, Conversations with a Dead Man
• Jovette Marchessault's Saga of the Wet Hens?
• Chester Brown, Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography
• Maria Campbell, Halfbreed
• Marie Clements, The Unnatural and Accidental Women
• Susan Swan, The Biggest Modern Woman of the World

Evaluation:听TBA

Format:听Lectures

Prerequisites: None

Expected Student Preparation: Previous work in cultural studies/ film studies

Description:听This class explores the work, over fifty years of French art cinema, of three exceptional filmmakers.听 Agnes Varda was one of the most significant filmmakers, and the only woman filmmaker, of the French New Wave, and a member of the Left Bank Group; her work has continued to the present day, rewriting conventional distinctions between documentary and fiction.听 From the brilliant Cl茅o de 5 脿 7, with the main character鈥檚 real time 诲茅谤颈惫别 through streets of Paris, to her recent series of experimental and autobiographical documentaries, Varda remains a powerful and original voice well into her 80s. 听Claire Denis, born in France and raised in Africa, has produced one of the most significant sets of films on the body of the last three decades, since her film debut in the late 1980s.听 Especially notable for her complicated intersections of race, masculinity and desire, Denis鈥� highly formalist style is shockingly affective, in works such as her updating of Billy Budd, Beau Travail, set amidst the French Foreign Legion, to the modern bio-horror of Trouble Every Day. The audacious works of Catherine Breillat are relentless explorations of questions of gender, sexuality, social convention and fantasy. From her feminist re-imaginings of fairy tales, to her controversial and explicit portrayals of sexuality, through the body politics of fat and feminism, Breillat extends the legacy of a French feminist filmmaking through the contemporary moment. Through exploring the works of these three filmmakers, this course will consider how questions of the body and sexuality, film form and aesthetics, politics, power and subversion have played out on screen in French cinema of the last fifty years.听

Texts:听Coursepack

Films may include: Agnes Varda Cl茅o de 5 脿 7, La Pointe Courte, Sans Toit ni Loi, Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse, L'Une chante, l'autre pas, Loin du Vietnam; Claire Denis Chocolat, Trouble Every Day, J鈥檃i pas sommeil, 35 rhums, Beau Travail, Catherine Breillat Une vraie jeune fille, 36 fillette, Romance X, 脌 ma soeur, Anatomie de l鈥檈nfer, Barbe Bleue

Evaluation:听TBA

Format:听Lectures, discussions and weekly screenings

Average Enrolment: 50 students

Prerequisites: None听

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with basic literary, film, and cultural studies concepts and terminology will be useful.

Description:听This course will trace the development of several major science fiction (sf) themes and consider them within various cultural and theoretical frameworks. Our texts will span a variety of media and time periods: in addition to a handful of novels, we will look at several films, television shows, radio broadcasts, short stories, comic books, and web series in order to think about how various media approach sf conventions. Our goal will be to explore the evolution of the genre in terms of its narrative structures, as well as its changing reception status. We will also think about the ways that scientific advancements and the rise of a more technologically-driven culture have affected the genre鈥檚 role in social discourses.

The idea of the posthuman will be central to our inquiries into sf themes. Posthumanism鈥檚 deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject invites us to reconsider body politics, gender identity, sociopolitical structures, and the ethics of technology. By aligning theory and criticism with a breadth of textual examples, we will explore how sf plays out fundamental ontological questions. By the end of this course, students will gain an understanding of the history and present state of sf and be equipped to engage with the theoretical stakes of the genre. 听

Texts: In addition to a course pack containing short fiction and theory/criticism, possible novels include Flatland, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Never Let Me Go, and Snow Crash. Possible films and television series include Forbidden Planet, The Twilight Zone, The Stepford Wives, Star Trek, Gattica, 12 Monkeys, The X-Files, The Matrix, Firefly, Blade Runner, and 28 Days Later.

Evaluation:听Response Papers (35%), Participation (15%), Genre Reflection (10%), Final Essay (40%)听

Description:听Reality TV has now become the type of programming most enthusiastically marketed by producers and TV companies and more importantly the form favored by millions of viewers in countries around the world.

The course will look at some of the shows that may have started this trend, such as Candid Camera, and examine how the form has evolved into present day shows. This will include interactive shows. We will look at shows from Britain and the US, but mainly from Canada where we will examine such shows as Intervention Canada, Real Housewives: Vancouver and Big Brother Canada.

The course will look at different categories of shows and will attempt to contextualize them within contemporary popular culture.

We will view and analyze some of the most popular Reality TV shows and attempt to gain an informed understanding of the reasons for their immense and increasing popularity.

Texts:

• Understanding Reality TV. Eds. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn, ISBN: 9780415517955. Routledge, 2006 (The book will be available at the Paragraphe book store)
• Articles and shows

Evaluation: TBA

Format:听Lectures, discussions, and screenings

Prerequisite: None听

Description:听 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.听 This year, ENGL 391 Special Topics in Cultural Studies surveys some theories of adaptation.听 Our first order of business will be to look at ways in which the artistic genre of adaptation has been conceptualized.听 Here we'll pay special attention to puzzles and problems surrounding the notion that movies are texts and that adaptations are "intertexts" or "palimpsestic texts."听 Textualist definitions of adaptation will be compared with alternative approproaches grounded in the idea that cinema is an essentially nontextual medium.听 To explore this alternative, we will need to clarify what it is that we are talking about when we use the terms 'text" and "medium."听 This discussion will give 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).听 At the same time, we'll survey some varieties of adaptation.听 Cinematic adaptations can be intelligently described as versions of their source works.听 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. 听But not all versions are, for instance, faithful to the original.听 Hence we'll link adaptation to the concepts of "fidelity," "artistic nesting," and "transgression." 听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.听 What, if anything, makes an adaptation good?听 Do they ever betoken originality?听 And what functions might adaptations possess as a mode of cultural transmission of narratives, values, and beliefs?听听听

Texts:听A selection of readings drawn from contemporary film theory and aesthetic philosophy; Linda Hutcheons, A Theory of Adaptation; Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley; Stephen King, The Shining; Alberto Moravia, Contempt

Films:

• 罢谤辞濒濒蹿濒枚箩迟别苍/The Magic Flute (Ingmar Bergman, 1975)
• Plein Soleil/Purple Noon (Ren茅 Cl茅ment, 1960)
• Le M茅pris/Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
• The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
• Kumonosu听 j么/Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)
• The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999)
• Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (Zacharias Kunuk, 2001)

Evaluation: TBA

Format:听Lectures, discussions, and screenings

Description:听Among the most popular forms of nineteenth-century literature, the Victorian crime novel intersected with and capitalized upon the rise of literacy, voyeuristic journalism, and forensic science.听 In this course we will read six novels that draw from generic typologies such as urban mythology (Reynolds), gothicism (Le Fanu), and clinical investigation (Conan Doyle), as well as a post-Victorian novel that appropriates the genre through听 a modern and filmic perspective (Du Maurier).听 The overlap between 鈥渢rue crime鈥� and fiction will also be explored through Victorian scandals including the Jack the Ripper murders.听

Texts:听

• 394 course reader
• G.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London (sel.)
• M.E. Braddon, Lady Audley鈥檚 Secret
• Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas
• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
• Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
• Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca

Evaluation:
Attendance/participation: 20%
Short essay: 20%
Longer essay OR creative assignment: 30%
Final exam: 30%

Format:
Lectures and discussions

Description:听This course introduces students to the field of Performance Studies, by asking how the paradigm of performance asks us to reconsider a range of epistemological and methodological issues across artistic, theoretical, and political frameworks. The course will outline a critical history of the field and its connections to different disciplines (theatre and anthropology, gender and queer studies, music and dance studies, philosophy and critical theory). We will discuss key topics such as performance and performativity; theatricality and everyday life; presence and representation; law and sovereignty; embodiment and subjectivity; performance and technology; as well as the performances of race and gender. Students will be encouraged to view, analyze, and write about live and documented theatrical, choreographic, sonic, ritual, and political events.

Texts:听Readings will include key texts by Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Frantz Fanon, Allan Kaprow, Fred Moten, Jos茅 Esteban Munoz, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, and Rebecca Schneider, among others

Evaluation:听Performance response (20%); final exam (30%); discussion prompts (20%); short essay (20%); participation (10%)

Format: Lectures and discussions