平特五不中

Prerequisite: none

Expected student preparation: previous university-level literature courses. This course is an advanced seminar, in which active participation will be required.听

Description:听Samuel Johnson鈥檚 final work, Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (1779-81), later known as Lives of the Poets, was among the most ambitious and influential of his many publications. It surveys the lives and writings of the major English poets from about 1600 to 1750: from the metaphysical poets and Milton to Johnson鈥檚 contemporary, Thomas Gray. In this course we shall consider a selection of these prefaces, together with some of the poetry under discussion: thus Johnson鈥檚 preface to Milton will be accompanied by a study of 鈥淟ycidas鈥� and his preface to Gray by a class on 鈥淓legy written in a Country Churchyard.鈥� The aim of the course is to consider the ways in which Johnson鈥檚 prefaces illuminate or obscure the work of his predecessors, as well as to examine how far eighteenth-century approaches to poetry differ from those of today. The course will also pay attention to Johnson鈥檚 own poetry, from 鈥淟ondon鈥� (1738) and 鈥淭he Vanity of Human Wishes鈥� (1751) to 鈥淥n the Death of Dr Robert Levet鈥� (1782). We shall study these poems in the context of some of Johnson鈥檚 remarks on the nature of poetry, made in essays in The Rambler and The Idler.

罢别虫迟蝉:听

Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. John Mullan. Oxford World鈥檚 Classics.
颁辞耻谤蝉别辫补肠办听

鈥�Evaluation:听厂别尘颈苍补谤 presentation 25%; participation in class discussion 25%; term paper 50%.

Format:听Lectures, seminar presentations, and class discussion

Description:听What is the contemporary novel? What historical dynamics or aesthetic features define its emergence as a formal category? This seminar will tackle such broad questions by pairing ten to twelve novels, all published since 2009, with criticism drawn from literary sociology, media studies, anthropology, new economic criticism, and feminist theory. Reading across a rich cross-section of authors and genres鈥攇raphic novels, genre fiction, auto-fiction, avant-garde fiction鈥攚e will examine the novel鈥檚 various and evolving conditions of production, reception, and criticism; its relationship to other media forms, both old (print culture) and new (the Internet); its investment in national boundaries, 鈥済lobal English,鈥� and the politics of translation; and the always vexed interplay between the novel鈥檚 aesthetic and commercial values. Students will have the opportunity to write a long review essay (which they will be encouraged to submit to a venue like听苍+1, The Point, Contemporaries, Public Books, The New Republic, or听Los Angeles Review of Books) or a creative work.

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work offering some training in relevant areas: critical analysis of poetry and fiction; 20th-century Canadian Literature.听

罢别虫迟蝉:听

Paul Beatty, The Sellout
Elena Ferrante, The Neapolitan Quartet (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, The Story of the Lost Child)
Han Kang, The Vegetarian
Tao Lin, Taipei
Tom McCarthy, Remainder
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Ali Smith, How to Be Both
Chris Ware, Building Stories
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

Evaluation:听Class presentations (30%); Participation (30%); Review Essay (40%)

Format:听Lecture and discussion

Description:听This course examines colonial and postcolonial novels from South Asia, from the late-nineteenth century to the present moment, to understand the emergence and development of the literary form in that region. We will read novels from British India, as well as from the postcolonial nation-states of India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan, seeking to understand how the literary form represents South Asian life-worlds, besides responding to colonial modernity and its aftermath. We will inquire into the key formal, aesthetic, and political concerns of these novels while paying particular attention to how the authors articulate notions of belonging and alienation; represent the family and the nation; construct understandings of history; express the ideas of love, friendship, and injustice; and engage with issues such as gender, class, race, and caste in their works. In addition to reading selections from theorists of the novel such as Gyorgy Lukacs, Mikhail Bakhtin, Ian Watt, Franco Moretti, and Fredric Jameson, we will investigate the status of realism and modernism (and irrealism) in the global periphery, seeking to understand how they inform the idea of 鈥減eripheral aesthetics鈥� of world literature scholarship. 听

Texts (tentative):听

Bankim Chatterjee 鈥� The Sacred Brotherhood (1882)
Rabindranath Tagore 鈥� Home and the World (1916)
Mulk Raj Anand 鈥� Untouchable (1935)
Abdullah Hussein 鈥� The Weary Generations (1963)
Upamanyu Chatterjee 鈥� English, August (1988)
Taslima Nasrin 鈥� Shame (1993)
Kiran Desai 鈥� Hullaballoo in the Guava Orchard (1998)
Aravind Adiga 鈥� Between the Assassinations (2010)

Evaluation:听罢叠础

Format:听Lecture and discussion

Expected Student Preparation: previous university courses in English literature.

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

Texts:听

Dance of the Happy Shades (Penguin)
Lives of Girls and Women (Penguin)
Who Do You Think You Are? (Penguin)
The Progress of Love (Penguin)
Friend of My Youth (Penguin)
Open Secrets (Penguin)
The View from Castle Rock (Penguin)
Too Much Happiness (Penguin)

Evaluation:听short essay (3 pp.): 20%; medium essay (5 pp.): 30%; long essay (10 pp.): 40%; participation: 10%

Format:听Lecture and discussion

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level course work offering some training in relevant areas: critical analysis of poetry and fiction; 20th-century Canadian Literature.听

Description:听Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood share a closely aligned space in terms of Canadian literary history. Although Atwood began to publish her work almost a decade earlier than Ondaatje, both writers came of professional age during a period marked by profound changes in the Canadian literary landscape. That landscape will be explained in detail. Atwood鈥檚 poetry, fiction, and literary criticism transformed the way Canadians understood their national literature. After the publication of Survival, in 1972, a new set of values were introduced that challenged existing norms and set the stage for the arrival of new wave feminism in Canada. At the same time, Atwood was breaking down conventional notions of history, undermining ideas about literary canons, and critiquing received assumptions about sexual norms. Meanwhile, Ondaatje was importing some of the haunting exoticism associated with his childhood years in Sri Lanka. His Canadian poems were set in strange jungles. They explored bizarre transformations and imaginative realms. He liked characters who were 鈥渟ane assassins鈥� and he insisted that 鈥淢y mind is pouring chaos / in nets onto the page.鈥� Both authors are drawn to difference, eccentricity, lawlessness, madness. Their characters fall off the map. Like Atwood, Ondaatje wants to revise history, undermine the way we see space, and challenge the status quo when it comes to representing memory, eroticism, desire. But above all, both authors redefine the nature of creativity. What does Ondaatje mean when he asks: 鈥淲hy do I love most / among my heroes those / who sail to that perfect edge / where there is no social fuel鈥�? We will find out. How could Atwood write a poem called 鈥淭his Is a Photograph of Me,鈥� only to reveal that it 鈥渨as taken / the day after I drowned鈥�? How can she be writing the poem, if she is dead? There are some interesting solutions to this mystery. But the poems are more than mysterious. In following the poetic careers of these two eminent writers, we will transform our own understanding of the nature of the creative act. Along the way, we will meet murderers, dreamers, executioners, madmen, seducers, deviants, and a host of others who are prepared to challenge us at every turn. This will not be innocent. It will not be easy. Confession may be involved. The first half of the course will be devoted to Ondaatje鈥檚 poetry; the second half will focus on Atwood鈥檚. Students should be prepared to write on a weekly basis, in order to effect the inevitable self-transformation.

Texts: TBA

贰惫补濒耻补迟颈辞苍听(辫谤辞惫颈蝉颈辞苍补濒): participation (10%); attendance (10%); a series of short essays (60%); one group project (20%).

Format:听厂别尘颈苍补谤

Description:听ENGL 411 explores fictions written by and about Asian-Canadians primarily over the last three decades. We will pay particular attention to the developmental story they tell, how they collectively comment upon the purposes of fiction to tell the life stories of individuals and community, and how they form a dynamic canon.听The novels and biotexts are varied, readable, and moving. They also provide powerful arguments about the value of story, the truth-value of fiction, and the impact of novels on the policy landscape in Canada.

As we will see, authors identified an emerging canon of East Asian Canadian writing in the 1980s, and began to position themselves within it during the 1990s, but critical commentary only fully identified that canon with the publication of Guy Beauregard's groundbreaking 1999 study. A year later, Donald Goellnicht quite rightly asked why it had taken so long? In this course will explore answers to that question by reading the works in chronological sequence alongside emerging literary criticism of the day, and in relation to historical accounts of the Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese communities in Canada.

By the end of the course, and in Canada's sesquicentennial year, you will have explored Canada's history and historical immigration policy landscape, seen examples of the way fiction has been used effectively to effect policy change, and become familiar with a vibrant, entertaining and sophisticated literary canon.听

罢别虫迟蝉:听TBD, but in addition to a coursepack containing secondary materials, short interviews and author commentary, primary readings are likely to be:

Onoto Watanna and Sara Bosse, Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1914)
Joy Kogawa, Obasan (1981)
Sky Lee, Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990)
Denise Chong, The Concubine's Children: Portrait of a Family Divided (1994)
Hiromi Goto, Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) and 听鈥淎lien Texts, Alien Seductions: The Context of Colour Full Writing鈥� (1998)
Wayson Choy, Jade Peony (1995)
Roy Miki, "Asiancy" (1995)
Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (1996) with reference to Faking It (2000) or Waiting for Saskatchewan 1985)
Judy Fong Bates, Midnight at the Dragon Cafe (2004)
Thu虂y, Kim. 惭茫苍. (2013; translated to English in 2014)
Kim Fu, For Today I am a Boy (2014)

Evaluation:听Attendance and participation: 15%; 3 short assignments, one will include an in-class presentation component 3@20%; Journal assignment 25%

Format:听厂别尘颈苍补谤

Preparation: Students should have taken at least one 200-level and one 300-level course in English; and ideally, will have previous work in poetry.

Description:听Until the 1980s, the canon associated with modern anglophone poetry, established by mid-twentieth-century critical work, was assumed to consist of the work of major figures such as W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. This mid-century critical consensus, now problematized but still influential, largely overlooked many women who had contributed crucially to the development of modern poetry. Between 1900 and 1960, however, many women were actively engaged in the effort to revolutionize anglophone poetry: within early twentieth-century literary circles, their work was esteemed, and they fulfilled pivotal cultural roles. This course focuses on the women that Bonnie Kime Scott has called the 鈥渇orgotten and silenced makers鈥� of modern poetry. We will examine how women shaped the development of modern poetry not only as poets, but also as critics, patrons, publishers, and editors. As we engage their work, we will also consider how recent scholarship and criticism has sought to redress the historical record, return them to attention, and acknowledge their achievements.

We begin by reviewing a range of examples of how women are figured in well-known modern poetry鈥攖o discern some of the roles for and assumptions about women inscribed in poetic work of this period. We then move to the work of poets such as H.D., Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Stevie Smith, Muriel Rukeyser, Dorothy Livesay, P.K. Page, and Elizabeth Bishop. We will also consider the work of women editors of little avant-garde magazines, such as Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry, and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of The Little Review: these were editors who published the work of aspiring, experimental modern poetry when mainstream magazines were refusing it, often thereby helping to launch the careers of many poets now considered dominant among the moderns.

As we focus on women poets, in addition to reckoning closely with their poetry, which often involves the many forms of 鈥渄ifficulty鈥� associated with modern poetry, we will also engage from a literary-historical angle their contributions to the 鈥渕aking of modern poetry鈥�: we will address, for example, H.D.鈥檚 vital (and hitherto unacknowledged) role in the formation of the poetic movement of 鈥淚magism,鈥� as well as her influential critical engagements with Ancient Greek literature; tensions between Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound over command of Imagism as a movement; Millay鈥檚 鈥渋t girl鈥� celebrity; Mina Loy鈥檚 fraught alliance with Italian Futurism and her 鈥淔eminist Manifesto鈥� of 1914; Marianne Moore鈥檚 editorship of The Dial; collaborative relationships between H.D. and Moore, and Moore and Bishop; and Gertrude Stein鈥檚 many connections with the visual arts. We will also attend to how these women poets engaged the feminisms of their time, often as mediated by the early twentieth-century concept of the 鈥淣ew Woman.鈥�

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

Evaluation:听brief critical analysis (5-6 pp., 20%), brief essay (4-5 pp., 20%), fictional autobiography (4 pp., 15%), final essay (8 pp., 30%), participation (15%)

Format:听Lecture and discussion

Prerequisites: Students should have at least 3 prior university courses in literature听

Description:听This course examines American novels written in the 1920s. Attention will be paid to expatriates writing from locations abroad, as well as the tendency to cast the United States as a republic independent of foreign influence and politics. The effects of World War I, the immigration quotas established by the 1924 Immigration Act, Prohibition, stock market euphoria, jazz, telephones, telegraphs, the Harlem Renaissance, and other phenomena of the decade will be brought to bear upon readings of diverse novels that span the decade. We will consider the stretching of novelistic genre to include epic and romance impulses, realist and naturalist techniques, and modernist sensibilities. Attention will be paid to race and gender, especially the way male and female writers respond to each other.

罢别虫迟蝉:听

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blonds
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Nella Larsen, Passing

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

Format:听lecture and discussion

Description:听In this course, we study theatre and conversion in early modern England. A conversion is a 鈥渢urning in position, direction, destination鈥� (Oxford English Dictionary) within a field of possibilities that reconstitutes the field itself. Religious conversion is one kind within a field of interrelated forms that includes geopolitical reorientation, material transformation, commercial exchange, literary translation, class and sex change, and human-animal metamorphosis. We ask, how did the forms of conversion translate the horizon lines of knowledge and experience for early modernity, what were the lines of connection among the different forms, and how did theatre integrate, critique, and enable forms of conversion for its playgoers? We study plays by Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Thomas Middleton; related texts about conversion such as those by Augustine, Ovid, and others; and work on the history and theory of conversion.

The idea for the course emerges from a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project, called 鈥淓arly Modern Conversions: Religions, Cultures, Ecologies of Cognition鈥� (). The links between the course and the project mean that students will not only be studying theatre and conversion in Shakespeare鈥檚 England but will also be taking an active part in the creation of a new way of understanding religion, culture, theatre, and individual and collective transformation.

罢别虫迟蝉:听

A Midsummer Night鈥檚 Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford)
The Winter鈥檚 Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford)
Anthony and Cleopatra, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford)
Measure for Measure, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford)
Merchant of Venice, ed. Jay Halio (Oxford)
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, ed. Sylvan Barnett (Signet)
Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in Women Beware Women and other Plays, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford)
Other readings will be provided in electronic form.

Evaluation:听

Four short essays (2 pages double-spaced each) 40%
Participation 15%
鈥�Final paper (12 pages) 45%

Format:听lecture and discussion

Description:听In early 1987, the police in Kenya were searching for an activist called Matigari, who was stirring the peasantry and the workers with his demands for truth and justice. Matigari, however, existed only as the protagonist of Ngugi wa Thiong鈥檕鈥檚 novel with the same title鈥攁n embarrassing discovery for the police that turned them against the book and its author.听 This anecdote attests to the transformative powers of literature within the social and political realms, especially in a postcolonial context.

One of the giants of African literature, author of numerous novels, plays, collections of essays, a prison diary, and children鈥檚 literature, Ngugi has influenced contemporary debates on postcolonial literature and globalization, the role of leftist esthetics, decolonization and neo-colonialism, the languages of African literature, nationalism and literary production, oral literature and its audience in the era of the internet and, more recently, the concept of 鈥減oor theory.鈥� The questions he raises in his works resonate with those posed by other postcolonial intellectuals so that to read them is to discuss cultural dilemmas representative of the past 50 years around the world. We will read a selection of his works in tandem with essays by Chinua Achebe, Kwame Nkrumah, Molara Ogundipe Leslie, Gayatri Spivak, Karl Marx, Georg Lukacs, Raymond Williams, Simon Gikandi and others.

Texts:听NB: The final list of readings will be available by the end of October 1016. You are encouraged to start reading before the beginning of classes in January 2017.

Coursepack
Ngugi wa Thiong鈥檕: A Grain of Wheat
Ngugi wa Thiong鈥檕 Petals of Blood
Ngugi wa Thiong鈥檕 Devil of the Cross
Ngugi wa Thiong鈥檕 Matigari
Ngugi wa Thiong鈥檕 Wizard of the Crow
Binyavanga Wainaina: One Day I Will Write about This Place

Films:
Xala. Dir. Ousmane Sembene
鈥�Pumzi. Dir. Wanuri Kahiu

Evaluation:听Presentation 20%; Midterm 30%; Final paper 35%; Participation (including webct assignments) 15%

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Description:听This course spotlights the 1890s in British literature, testing received ideas about the decade鈥檚 dominant moods and memes against a range of fiction, poetry, and drama. The years between 1890 and 1900 are those of Stoker鈥檚 Dracula, Conan Doyle鈥檚 Sherlock Holmes, H.G. Wells鈥檚 War of the Worlds, controversy about the 鈥淣ew Woman,鈥� the 鈥渄andy,鈥� the middle Henry James, Aestheticism and Decadence, concerns about 鈥渟exual anarchy,鈥� the late work of Thomas Hardy, The Yellow Book, Aubrey Beardsley and Art Nouveau, and both the meteoric success and the trials of Oscar Wilde. Although the era to which the 1890s belong (called the of the 鈥渇in de si猫cle鈥�) is often understood as a transitional stage between Victorianism and modernism, a brief phase registering defiance of the Victorian aesthetics and mores of previous decades, this course maintains that the period deserves to be read as importantly distinct from both the Victorian and modernist eras鈥攚ith a cultural environment, leading concerns, guiding anxieties, structures of feeling, and aesthetic commitments of its own. The decade was widely understood as deriving character from its 蹿颈苍-诲别-蝉颈猫肠濒别 position. Public discourse of the time suggested that as the nineteenth century drew to a close, the moment was ripe for speculation about what the new century might bring: commentators such as Holbrook Jackson read the era鈥檚 emphasis on iconoclasm, artifice, style, and adventure as auguring promising new beginnings. Yet others construed the times as characterized by a foreboding 鈥渟ense of an ending鈥� suggesting a culture in decline: in Degeneration (1892), Max Nordau diagnosed what he read as a diseased society through the 鈥渟ymptoms鈥� of aberrant behavior, bizarre art, and a taste for what Walter Pater called 鈥渟trange鈥� sensations. As we both explore the diversity and common threads among the literature we investigate, we will consider the nature of the decade鈥檚 rejoinders鈥攐ften critical, sometimes Romantic鈥攖o earlier Victorian literature, as well as ways in which its cultural work paves the way for the innovations of modernism.

Texts:听will likely include

Caird, Mona, Daughters of Danaus (1894)
Conan Doyle, Arthur, selections from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
Gissing, George, The Odd Women (1893)
Hardy, Thomas, Jude the Obscure (1896)
Shaw, G.B., Plays Unpleasant (1898)
Stoker, Bram, Dracula (1897)
Wells, H.G. War of the Worlds (1898)
Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Wilde, plays: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), 厂补濒辞尘茅 (1893)
Egerton, George (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Keynotes and Discords (1893-4)

We will also read short fiction from The Yellow Book (including the work of Henry James), and poetry by W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, William Watson, Lionel Johnson.
鈥�A course reader will include contextual readings from Walter Pater, A.C. Swinburne, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henrik Ibsen, Charles Baudelaire, St茅phane Mallarm茅, Jules Laforgue.

Evaluation:听Two brief essays (4 pp.) (20% each), longer essay (7-8 pp.) (30%), creative response (15%), participation (15%)

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Prerequisite: Students should have taken an English course at the 300-level.

Description:听Ireland possesses a remarkably large and varied corpus of medieval literature, especially vernacular literature, still extant. In the nineteenth century, there was an upsurge of interest in these early works and the vernacular Irish in which they were written down, which led to many being edited and published. This coincided with the upsurge in Irish nationalism and the Irish Literary Revival, wherein many writers sought the roots of Irish literature in its past (for example, the publication of A Literary History of Ireland from earliest times to the present day by Douglas Hyde in 1901). Lady Augusta Gregory, another leading member of the revival, translated many of the mythological tales and tales from the Finn cycle in Gods and Fighting Men, published in 1904, as well as stories from the Ulster Cycle in Cuchulainn of Muirthemne, published in 1902. Her works were an inspiration to her colleague and friend, W.B. Yeats.

This course explores some of these early works, in more recent English translations, which inspired this renaissance: the tales of the mythological origins of Ireland by the Tuatha De Danaan; the stories of Finn mac Cumhail and his fianna; the tales of the Ulster Cycle, focussing on the great hero, C煤chulainn.听

Texts:听

Tales of the Elders of Ireland (Acallamh n Sen贸rach), trans. Ann Dooley and Harry Roe (Oxford, 1999).
The T谩in: from the Irish Epic T谩in B贸 Cuailnge, trans. Thomas Kinsella (Oxford, 1969).
Early Irish Myths and Sagas, trans. Jeffrey Gantz (Penguin, 1981).听
鈥�Others to be decided.

Evaluation:听essays, presentation, participation and attendance.

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Description:听Although he died in 1956, Bertolt Brecht鈥檚 theatre work continues to influence contemporary writers, actors, directors, designers, filmmakers, poets, activists, teachers, musicians, performance artists, philosophers, theoreticians and literary critics.听 In his constant demand for innovation and for experimentation with traditional forms, Brecht remains an exemplar of the radical potential for art to intervene in social spheres. Caryl Churchill may be the most innovative and imaginative playwright of the second half of the twentieth century; her oeuvre is characterized by both dramaturgical experiment and groundbreaking theatricality.听 She has produced some of the most important plays in the contemporary repertoire while re-inventing, from play to play, what we consider to be dramatic form.听 Her plays deal with a variety of topics such as property, revolution, colonialism, women鈥檚 emancipation, sexuality, environmental crisis, war, and the nature of selfhood, always from the perspective of the playwright鈥檚 socialism and feminism.

In this course, we will study the most representative and influential plays of Churchill鈥檚 career so far, as well as some of her less well-known dramas, and consider them from a broadly 鈥淏rechtian鈥� perspective, reading plays and theoretical essays by Brecht in conjunction with Churchill鈥檚 plays.听 The focus of the class is the close study of the published dramatic scripts and class discussion.听 In your assignments you will be expected to draw on a background in theatre studies while engaging in close analysis of the plays.

Please note: attendance at each and every class will be mandatory.听 Students should be prepared to make frequent verbal contributions in every class, and complete homework assigned from class to class, and there will be a substantial class participation grade included in evaluation (20%).

Texts:听A selection of plays and essays by Brecht, and a selection of plays by Churchill.

Evaluation:听Class participation:20%; Assignment #1: 20%; Major Essay: 30%; Final Assignment: 30%

Format:听Lecture, class discussion, and student participation

Description:听This course surveys modern and contemporary drama, theatre, and performance art from across the Western hemisphere, with special focus on Latin America, the Hispanophone Caribbean, and US Latina/o communities. As we move geographically through the hemisphere, we will learn about the political, cultural, social, and economic factors informing theatrical production. Thematic concerns will include: theatre against dictatorship in the Southern Cone and beyond; migration and exile; indigeneity; political theatre in the 鈥渂orderlands;鈥� gender and sexuality; populism, protest, and 鈥淭heatre of the Oppressed;鈥� histories of collective creation in the Americas; and expressions of Latina/o North American identities.听

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

Carmen Aguirre (Chile/Canada
Lola Arias (Argentina)
Sabina Berman (M茅xico)
Enrique Buenaventura (Colombia)
N茫o Bustamante (USA)
Guillermo Calder贸n (Teatro en el Blanco, Chile)
Carmelita Tropicana (Cuba/USA)
Migdalia Cruz (Puerto Rico/USA)
Nilo Cruz (Cuba/USA)
FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya) (Chiapas, M茅xico)
Mar铆a Irene Forn茅s (Cuba/USA)
Coco Fusco (Cuba/USA)
Griselda Gambaro (Argentina)
Guillermo G贸mez-Pe帽a (Mexico/USA)
Astrid Hadad (Mexico)
LEGOM (Mexico)
Antonio Machado (Cuba/USA)
Mujeres Creando (Bolivia)
Teatro Campesino (USA)
Teatro L铆nea de Sombra (M茅xico)
Violeta Luna (M茅xico)
Teatro Malayerba (Ecuador)
Teatro Oficina (Brazil)
Juan Radrig谩n (Chile)
Jos茅 Rivera (Puerto Rico/USA)
Jesusa Rodr铆guez and Liliana Felipe (M茅xico/Argentina)
Guillermo Verdecchia (Argentina/Canada)
Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (Peru)

Additionally, we will utilize the following base texts:

Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend, Eds. Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theatre and Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2008).
Ana Puga, Ed. Spectacular Bodies, Dangerous Borders. Latin American Theatre Review Books (University of Kansas Press, 2011).
鈥�A course pack comprising secondary sources by scholars including Natalie Alvarez, Francine A鈥橬ess, Gloria Anzald煤a, Alicia Arriz贸n, Stuart Day, May Farnsworth, Jean Graham-Jones, Paola Hern谩ndez, Larry LaFountain-Stokes, Jill Lane, Jos茅 Mu帽oz, Ana Puga, Rossana Reguillo, Ram贸n Rivera-Servera, Leticia Robles, Camilla Stevens, Diana Taylor, and Tamara Underiner.

All texts will be available in English translation.听

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

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Description:听Life-writing has a long history, yet it has been said we are living in a memoir boom (though not the first and only). Our focus is less on why that is and more on what is there. We will read and discuss some late-twentieth and twenty-first century memoirs with a view to understanding how, in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, 鈥渃ertain tight parentheses have been opened and allowed to spill their still active contents 鈥� Mnemosyne, one must admit, has shown herself to be a very careless girl鈥� (Speak, Memory). If memoir begins 鈥渨ith the intuition of meaning 鈥� with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of听 contingency and become story鈥� then we will treat these memoirs as if they were fictional stories and ask: what are the stories and how are they told?

Texts (Books):

Maus, Art Spiegelman
The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison
Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
Are You My Mother?, Alison Bechdel
My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard (selections)
The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster
Incest, Anais Nin
Colored People, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 听
The Last Supper, Rachel Cusk

Theoretical essays by: Roland Barthes, Ben Yagoda, Sven Birkerts, Nancy K Miller, Michel Foucault

Essays by: Steve Martin, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Dasvid Sedaris, Daphne Merkin, Katha Pollitt, Jonathan Lethem, Nancy K. Miller

Diaries by (selections): John Cheever, Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin, Susan Sontag

Autobiographical photography by: Sally Mann, Andres Serrano, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Leibowitz

Evaluation: (provisional) 20% participation; 40% first essay (2000 words); 40% second essay (2000)

Format:听lecture, presentation of visual material, discussion

Prerequisite: Students must have taken some English literature courses at the 300- or 400-level.

Description:听The fairy tale as a literary genre has its roots in ancient and medieval mythological tales, folktales, romances and wonder tales. Fairy tales thus stand in a long tradition of storytelling but as a literary genre, the fairy tale itself is fairly modern; it may even be considered one of the precursors to the short story and the novel. Although fairy tales today are frequently considered part of children鈥檚 literature, fairy tales have not always been aimed at children, nor do they all end happily. These are fairly recent developments in the history of fairy tales, ones which tend to occlude their importance as a literary genre.

The literary fairy tale as a modern genre begins to appear in the sixteenth-century, when such tales were composed for an adult audience (a tradition beginning with tales by the Italian writers, Giovan Straparola and Giambattista Basile). In seventeenth-century France, Charles Perrault, whose fairy tales are among the most familiar in western European literature, was only one of several writers who wrote fairy tales for the literary salons of Paris in the ancien r茅gime. His contemporary, Madame la Comtesse d鈥橝ulnoy charmed her social and literary circle with her tale of the White Cat, among others, while Madame Leprince de Beaumont, into the eighteenth century, composed the story of Beauty and the Beast for the edification of young ladies.

Literary fairy tales aimed at adult audiences were in vogue into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when German Romanticism inspired the collecting efforts of the Brother Grimm. They have continued to be written into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The aim of this course is to examine the literary fairy tale as a narrative genre; to look at different manifestations of well-known tales, from its precursors to the present-day; and to explore how their themes are continually reimagined, reconfigured and reinterpreted. Some of the authors to consider are likely to include Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Oscar Wilde, Mary de Morgan, and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. In the twentieth century, we see authors such as Elizabeth Bowen, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter, and A.S. Byatt working in 鈥� and reworking 鈥� the genre.

Texts:听TBD

Evaluation:听Participation and attendance, essay, final paper, other to be decided.

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Description:听Anticipating Canada's sesquicentennial year, in ENGL 441 we will explore Canada's history through its literary cuisine---what writers have 'cooked up' to serve their readers. In the first instance, remembering that food in fiction is always symbolic, and textual representations of food always distant from the material realities of food preparation, service and consumption, we will examine what stories foodways depicted in works of literature can and do tell. In what way do these texts give new insights into the evolution of Canadian foodways and to what has motivated food choices over time?

But we will always pay close attention to the fictionality and literariness of the primary texts, and to the way texts mobilize rhetorical, narrative, and genre-specific techniques to nourish their readers. Drawing on insights from Roland Barthes, David Bevan, Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa Goldthwaite Terry Eagleton, Sandra Gilbert, Carol McFeely, Diane McGee, Mary Ann Schofield, Anna Shapiro, Linda Wolfe and others, we will consider in particular how metaphors of consumption figure in our understanding of how texts work.

We will read the works in a loosely chronological fashion, organized according to the period in which the action takes place rather than the date of publication, and alongside discussion of milestones in Canadian social, cultural, and culinary history. In this way, we will work to identify and interrogate the narrative of Canada's evolving foodways. 听 听 听 听 听 听

Texts:听TBD, but in addition to a coursepack (containing short stories, Canada's food guides if not available online, historical recipes and relevant secondary materials and theoretical articles), primary readings will be a selection from the following:

John Franklin鈥檚 Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea听(1823) and Margaret Atwood鈥檚 story 鈥淭he Age of Lead."
Anna Jameson, Excerpts from Winter Studies and Summer Rambles (1838)
Catharine Parr Traill, Excerpts from The Female Emigrant's Guide (1854)
Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries (1993)
Nellie McClung, 鈥淪owing Seeds in Danny鈥� (1905)
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Mina Hubbard, excerpts from A Woman鈥檚 Way through Unknown Labrador听(1908)
Onoto Watanna and Sara Bosse, excerpts from The Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1914)
Charles G.D. Roberts, "When Twilight Falls on the Stump Lot" or "Sweet Meats" from Kindred of the Wild" (1935)
Gabrielle Roy, The Tin Flute (1945)
Mavis Gallant, excerpt from The Hunger Diaries (1952)
Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (1996)
Austin Clarke, Pig Tails 'n' Breadfruit听(2000)
Timothy Taylor, Stanley Park (2001)
Eden Robinson, excerpts from The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols & Modern Storytelling (2011)
鈥�Thu虂y, Kim. 惭茫苍. (2013; translated to English in 2014)

Evaluation:听Attendance and participation: 15%; 3 writing assignments in different formats, one will include an in-class presentation component 3@20%; Journal assignment 25%

Format:听厂别尘颈苍补谤

Description:听This is not a course on feminism or feminist theory though some of the ideas we encounter will address feminist concerns. The focus of the course is on some female writers whose work brings them and their ideas into public circulation. Most of our readings are non-fiction but we will also consider the notion the fiction serves as theory and so a few works are novels and short stories. All the writing is placed in the context of considerations of what it means to be a public intellectual, i.e., one who writes for an educated public on questions inflected by ideological concerns. The public intellectual writes without the constraints of academic prose and argumentation yet there is scholarly emphasis on processes of reading and writing; the role of the author and authority; writing as a public activity; the self-conscious role of the critic and self-criticism; matters of principle and matters of judgment, among others. Our focus is on what these women isolate for discussion and how they do it.

Texts:听

A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft
The Second Sex, Simone deBeauvoir
The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer
Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, Gloria Steinem
Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time, Katha Pollitt
The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm
Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag
Dreaming of Hitler, Daphne Merkin
The female Things, Laura Kipnis
Bad Feminist, Roxanne Gay
Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, Malala Yousafzai
The White Album, Joan Didion
No Logo, Naomi Klein
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories, Hilary Mantel

Evaluation:听(provisional) 30% short discussion papers; 60% 2 short essays; 10% participation

Format:听lecture and听discussion

Prerequisite:听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 epistemologically 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."

In defining and using our evolving critical vocabulary, we shall be examining drama, theatre, performance, and film fields and sub-fields, including theatre and anthropology, gender studies, musicology, philosophy, linguistics, philosophy, art history, archival practices, and a plenitude of critical theories. Key topics will include not only 鈥榯heatricality鈥� and 鈥榩erformativity (performance)鈥�, but also presence and representation, embodiment and subjectivity / subject-positions, the archive and the repertoire, gender politics, ideologically-determined poetics of space / place, the dis/ease of memory, intra- and inter-medial translation, the principles and practices of the gaze, acting vs. performance, 鈥榗ultural literacy,鈥� dislocated identities, the poetics of tradition and experiment, exercises in deconstructing the hegemony of (mainstream) naturalism, the constitution of the 鈥榥atural,鈥� the de-naturalized subject, corporeal reifications, and the performance of the trinity of race, class, and gender. 听

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听SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism听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. Other theoretical readings to be found in the Course Pack and online are by Philip Auslander, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler,听David Savran, Dwight Conquergood, Diana Taylor, Rebecca Schneider, Jacques Derrida, W. B. Worthen, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, Marvin Carlson, Victor Turner, Frantz Fanon, Homi K. Bhabha, Andrew Parker, Michel de Certeau, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Shannon Jackson, Natalie Alvarez, Barbara Hogdon, Erika Fischer-Lichte, and Erica Lord.

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

Texts:听

Course Pack of articles and essays
Michel Tremblay,听Albertine In Five Times, 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)
Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Eds. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine (Folger Digital Texts)

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)
[Marina Abramovic]: The Artist Is Present, directors Matthew Akers and Jeff Dupre. Chicago, IL: Music Box Films, [2012]. HSSL: AV Reserve Room: 9488
Bob Wilson鈥檚 The Life & Death of Marina Abramovic, directed and written by Giada Cola Grande (2012)
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听(tentative):听Active participation in the intellectual and creative 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:听Brief, mid-sized, and longer lectures; led-discussions; presentations including interrogative Qs & As.

Average enrollment: 15 students

Expected Student Preparation: Previous university-level courses in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies. Restricted to U2 and U3 students.听

Description:听We will read the major dramatic theories concerned with the production, management, or solicitation of feeling in the theatre from the Neoclassical period through the recent turn to neuro-cognitive approaches. We鈥檒l ask the following questions, among others:听 How do actors portray a character鈥檚 emotional life?听 What are the mechanisms by which the stage picture thrills or surprises an audience? In each unit of study, we鈥檒l also read a play to which we might connect the theories.听 Students will conduct research into topics of special interest and present their findings to the class. Each unit will culminate in a student-led creative praxis session, which puts the theory into practice.

Units may include:
顿别蝉肠补谤迟别蝉鈥檚 Passions of the Soul
顿颈诲别谤辞迟鈥檚 Paradox of the Actor
Sturm und drang
Romanticism
Melodrama
Musical theatre
Stanislavski technique: feeling and identification
Cognitive science approaches to feeling and acting听 听

Texts:听Custom course reader composed of selections from acting theory, reception theory and performance theory; plus Erin Hurley Theatre & Feeling.

Evaluation:听Reading Journal (30%); Praxis session (30%); Discussion Prompts (10%); Research Paper (30%)

Format:听lecture, discussion, and practical work

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

Texts:听The required reading for this course will include selections from most or all of the following books, which will be available at The Word Bookstore (469 Milton Street, 514-845-5640). (The list of texts below is tentative and incomplete, to be confirmed in January 2017.)

• Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon, The Trials of Socrates (Hackett)
• Plato, Plato on Love (Hackett)
• Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations (Oxford, Penguin, or Hackett)
• St. Augustine, Confessions (Hackett or Oxford)
• Benvenuto Cellini, My Life (Oxford)
• Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Hackett)
• John Bunyan, Grace Abounding (Oxford)
• Daniel Defoe, Roxana (Broadview or Oxford)
• Denis Diderot, The Nun (Oxford)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther (Norton)
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (Oxford)
• Benjamin Constant, Adolphe (Oxford or Penguin)
• Stendhal, Love (Penguin)
• Roland Barthes, A Lover鈥檚 Discourse: Fragments (Hill and Wang)

Evaluation:听Paper (60%), presentations (30%), and participation (10%). Regular attendance is required for a passing final grade (a maximum of two absences after the add/drop period will be allowed except for documented medical or similar emergencies). Two or three optional film screenings may be offered in this course, depending on the interest and schedules of the participants.

Format:听厂别尘颈苍补谤

Limited enrollment:听Priority will be given to Drama and Theatre students. Admission to the class requires a written application (see below for exact format) and attendance at an entrance workshop, which will be held in mid April. 听Sign-up sheets will be posted on the door to Arts 240 by April 1, 2016.

Prerequisites: ENGL 230, ENGL 269 and/or permission of instructor.

Description:听This is a nine-credit theatre laboratory.听 The course will involve a very physical approach to theatre. Techniques and concepts will include Viewpoints and compositions, mask, Laban, states of tension, improvisation and Stanislavski based analysis.听 Students will engage in an depth analysis and investigation of a dramatic text as well as study of a chosen playwright and their context. 听The course will culminate in a production in March of 2017. Actors and Actor/Directors will be admitted.听

VERY IMPORTANT: This course is an extremely large time commitment with a great deal of rehearsal and preparation outside of class time.听

Texts:听

The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and Composition. Anne Bogart and Tina Landau. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005.
Playscript(s) and other texts: TBA

Evaluation:听Class participation and attendance (attendance is mandatory) 20%; Compositions and Presentation 20%; Dramaturgy Package and Presentation 15%; March Production: Compositions, Engagement. Development, Rehearsals, Performances 35%; Journals and Reflections 10%

Format:听Warm-ups; discussion; improvisation; movement and voice exercises; text interpretation; Viewpoints; presentation of research; scene work; oral presentations and rehearsals for a March/April Production

Application (see note above):

Submit answers to the following questions to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca.听 Due before the entrance workshop.听 (In your application please use both the number and subject for each response):

1-Acting Experience:
2-Improvisation Experience:
3-Theatre courses taken at 平特五不中 or elsewhere:
4-Any other relevant experience:
5-Other things I should know about you:
6-Expected year of graduation and Major(s) and Minor(s):
7-Have you taken ENGL 230?听 ENGL 269?
8-What will you bring to this course?听 This can expand on numbers 4 and 5 above.听 Discuss special attributes and personality traits.听 Talk about your ability as a collaborator.
9-What do you hope to get out of this course?

For numbers 10-13 you need to say 鈥淵ES, I have read this and agree.鈥� after each statement or question.听 If you need to say NO you shouldn鈥檛 apply for the course.听

10-Are you able and willing to commit 15 to 20 hours each week to rehearsals for this course in the Winter Term 2017? That means not being involved in another big project.听
11-In Winter Term 2017 I will keep Fridays from 2:35-5:25pm available for rehearsals.
12-I understand that we will also rehearse some evenings (usually Tuesdays and Thursdays) and Saturdays during January and February 2017.听
13-In March, April rehearsals and performances move to all evenings and Saturdays.听 I am able and willing to keep that time free.
14-Be sure to sign-up for an entrance workshop.听听

Prerequisites:听None.

Expected Student Preparation:听Previous university-level courses in drama and theatre, literature, or cultural studies of the kind that have taught you how to undertake original research and disseminate your interpretations of that research by various means.

Description:听This line from the distinguished American stage and screen actress, Ethel Barrymore, sums up in a witty fashion the complex subject who is at the front and centre of this research seminar: "For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros."

There are literally hundreds of biographies of and autobiographies by actresses. There is a large body of scholarly and non-scholarly literature on the history of the actress, on the lives, times, and careers of individual actresses, and on how the actress has been re/ presented in diverse ways, some of which are contradictory, paradoxical, and bogus.

There are plays and films in which actresses are traduced, celebrated, venerated, and demonized.

There are novels in which actresses (or their surrogates) are major and minor characters, frequently involved not only in acting but in acts of theatrical self-fashioning.

鈥�In so many of these works, the actress is mimesis-in-action, portrayed as a whore or as an angel or as somebody in-between, a hybrid, liminal, protean, threatening and / or comforting figure, often a Jungian archetype, a bewitching figure haunting, and haunted by, a dream grotto, someone 'made up' rather than 'real.'

There remains, however, so much more to learn about the actress: not only about her ever-shifting complexly gendered "iconic" status鈥攁nd why, how, and to what ends it is constructed / has been constructed to create sexuality, identity, image, and re/ presentation--but also about the material conditions which she has faced and continues to face as she has sought to create or been forced to assume that iconic status.

鈥�These conditions include training (both in formal acting programs and as tyros on the stage), actually getting work and being properly paid, being chosen and not chosen for particular (ideally star) roles, experimenting with innovative interpretations and sometimes subversive, sometimes conventional styles of performance, working within an ensemble, recognizing her perhaps ascendant position within a long genealogy of performance traditions, making or not making the transition from silent film to sound film, developing a repertoire defining the singularity of her persona both on and off the stage, wooing her fans, becoming and not becoming a sex symbol, dealing with both popular and specialist criticism, going into management as a practical act of agency, touring both at home and abroad, contesting social, family, and social stigmas, challenging racism and white-only casting and anti-theatrical hostility, struggling through the difficulties of aging, including the devastating impact of memory loss, and problematically achieving iconic autonomy and emancipation in a theatrical world often dominated by men exercising patriarchal principles and practices. And this is just a short list of some of those material conditions."

This is an advanced research seminar which will allow you the opportunity to engage in research into primary and secondary sources鈥攎emoirs and biographies, photographs and drawings, indeed all types of iconographic material, performance reviews, histories of the theatre, plays, films, and novels, the growing catalogue of scholarly work about the figure of the actress, etc.鈥攚ith the following interrelated objectives, among others:

• To interpret the multiple significances of these different kinds of sources;
• To rethink the functions, forms, and limitations of extant scholarship about the actress;
• To reconsider the functions, forms, and, in some cases, the ideological and perhaps hidden agendas of the signifying codes in artistic representations of the actress;
• To expand our collective understanding of why, how, and to what effects the actress has functioned, continues to function, in society as both a complex, mobile heterogeneous sign system and as a working woman;
• To enable all members of the seminar to undertake original research and to develop original scholarly analysis;
• To learn about the careers of individual actresses and about movements of actresses;
• To learn about performance genealogies; the stage history of a given role and how actresses have situated themselves in relation to that stage history, both in interpreting it and in executing it;
• To come to an understanding, in a preliminary way, of the material conditions of actresses' performances;
• To develop effective ways by which to analyze the work of actresses within socio-political, historical, aesthetic, geographic, broadly cultural, and gendered contexts.

罢别虫迟蝉:听The Cambridge Companion to the Actress, ed. Maggie B. Gale and John Stokes (Cambridge UP, 2007)

Films:听Stage Beauty听(2004), written by Jeffrey Hatcher, directed by Richard Eyre

Evaluation听(tentative):听Continuing full participation in the intellectual life of the seminar 15%; an annotated and / or written-out 'bibliographic / methodologies' report 15%; a presentation on an actress or group of actresses, analytical and issue-related 30%; a scholarly essay on an individually-negotiated topic in connection with our subject in the order of 15 to 20 pages (approximately 4000鈥�5,000 words) 40%

Format:听Lectures and discussions

Limited enrollment:听Permission of instructor required.听Admission to the course will be by application. See format below.听If you have never worked with me, please sign-up for an interview. Sign-up sheets will be on the door of Arts 240 by April 1, 2016.

Prerequisites: ENGL: 230 and 269 and/or permission of instructor.听

Description:听This course enhances skills already acquired by addressing the demands of public performance.听Units of work will be based on diverse theatrical periods before 1900 and will involve study of some of the major European and North American acting theories and practices.听 Scenes and poems will be analyzed and explored in a variety of ways in an effort to understand and own the text.听The needs of individual students will be addressed in terms of acting and interpretive skills.听Students will be introduced to the skills needed to speak verse and other heightened language.

Texts:听

Five Approaches to Acting by David Kaplan (West Broadway Press, 2001).
Actions: The Actors' Thesaurus by Marina Caldarone, Maggie Lloyd-Williams, 2004.
Plays TBA.

Format:听 Voice and movement exercises; warm-ups; discussion; oral and scene presentations.

Evaluation:听Attendance and Participation; Scenes and Presentations; Written Analysis, Journals and Research.听

Application:

Submit answers to the following questions to myrna.wyatt.selkirk [at] mcgill.ca. (In your application please use both the number and subject for each response):

1-Acting Experience:
2-Improvisation Experience (not required for this course):
3-Theatre courses taken at 平特五不中 or elsewhere:
4-Any other relevant experience:
5-Other things I should know about you:
6-Expected year of graduation and Major(s) and Minor(s):
7-Have you taken ENGL 230?听 ENGL 269?
8-What will you bring to this course?听 This can expand on numbers 4 and 5 above.听 Discuss special attributes and personality traits.听 Talk about your ability as a collaborator.
9-What do you hope to get out of this course?

Avg. enrollment: 14 students听

Description:听Between 1963-1968, American artist Andy Warhol made hundreds of experimental films.听 Brief as it was, Warhol鈥檚 own cinematic oeuvre re-capitulated and condensed the history of cinema, from his early recreation of primitive cinema (short, silent, black-and-white, non-edited, and non-narrative films) to his gradual incorporation of sound, color, editing, and camera movement, in the creation of a feature length, star-studded narrative cinema. Subjecting everyday life and the individual's always already fraught relation to self to the sadism of the recording apparatus, Warhol not only frustrated audience expectations, but re-envisioned what constituted a "movie."

In this course, we will examine more than a dozen selected films by the artist alongside copious readings in film history, art history, critical theory, and philosophy.听 Please note that although you may "like" Warhol's Pop Art silkscreens and other works, his films are exceptionally boring, very long, and extremely difficult to endure. You should not take this course if you are expecting to be entertained in any way or because you think that studying Warhol is "cool." On the contrary, this course is designed to teach students how to think with texts that make us suffer.

Please note that attendance at weekly screenings is mandatory; do not enroll in this course if you have any conflict with the screening time each week.听 In addition to participating on a weekly basis, and keeping a weekly journal, students are expected to write two long essays.

罢别虫迟蝉:听

Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism; The Warhol Sixties
Ara Osterweil, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film
Wayne Koestenbaum, Andy Warhol
Douglas Crimp, "Our Kind of Movie": The Films of Andy Warhol
David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties
Stephen Koch, Stargazer: The Life, World, and Films of Andy Warhol
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment
Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. Manifesto
John Cage, Silence
Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
Benjamin Buchloh, Neo Avant-Garde and the Culture Industry
Hal Foster, The Return of the Real
Jonathan Crary, 24/7
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World
Jennifer Doyle, Sex Objects
Gay Shame, ed. David Halperin and Valerie Traub
Eve Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet
Hilton Als, The Women
Saul Anton, Warhol's Dreams
Glyn Davis and Gary Needham, Warhol in Ten Takes
I'll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, ed. Wayne Koestenbaum & 听听听听 Kenneth Goldsmith
Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

Films:

Screen Tests
Kiss (1963)
Blow Job (1964)
Eating Too Fast (1966)
Screen Test #2 (1965)
Harlot (1964)
Couch (1964)
Haircut #1 (1963)
Mario Banana (1964)
John and Ivy (1965)
Outer and Inner Space (1965)
My Hustler (1965)
Lupe (1965)
The Life of Juanita Castro (1965)
Chelsea Girls (1966)
Hedy (1966)
Mrs. Warhol (1966)
I, a Man (1967)
Bike Boy (1967)
Lonesome Cowboys (1968)

Evaluation:听Attendance and class participation: 15%; Weekly Journal: 15%; Essay #1: 30%; Essay #2: 40%听 听

Format:听Lecture, discussion, and mandatory weekly screenings.

Expected student preparation: students enrolled in this course will ideally already have taken ENGL 230 Introduction to Theatre Studies and/or some drama and theatre coursework at the 300 level (preferably ENGL 370 Theatre History: The Long Eighteenth Century), another 400-level English course is also acceptable preparation

Description:听David Garrick (1717-1779) was the most important figure in the London theatre world of the 18th century. This course will examine his work as an actor, theatre manager, dramatist and adapter of plays, as well as his role in popularising Shakespeare and improving the status of the acting profession. Texts studied will include his original plays (in various genres), critical descriptions of his acting style, his dramatic adaptations (notably of Shakespeare) and accounts of his influence on society and culture in the period (including the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769). In addition to reading and discussing theatre history documents and play texts, students will also participate in practical workshops in which they will direct their peers in performing scenes from the plays studied in order to elucidate aspects of Garrick鈥檚 career. By focusing on Garrick, we will come to better understand the theatre of the 18th century and how an individual can achieve such dominance over a collaborative art form such as theatre.

罢别虫迟蝉:听a coursepack of required readings will be available for purchase from the 平特五不中 Bookstore

Evaluation听(tentative): participation 10%; midterm research assignment 20%, practical assignment 30%; final paper 40%

Format:听lecture, discussion, group work, practical work

Description:听Costumes do not exist in a vacuum; they respond to social and political factors specific to the era in which they were created.听 They are inextricably linked to the art and architecture of their day as they are to the current political and moral beliefs.听 A micro mini skirt comments on the sexual mores of the 1960鈥檚 as succinctly as any treatise on sexual liberation. We, along with Webster's Dictionary, use the term 鈥渃ostume鈥� to mean a style of clothing, ornaments, and hair used especially during a certain period, in a certain region, or by a certain class or group.

鈥�The structure of this course will alternate between instructor information and student response.听 The instructor will present the costume history of each specific era through images, example pieces, and embodied learning.听 In the next class, students will present their oral projects which respond to the specific era.听 They will answer questions such as:听 What is the common aesthetic between furniture and clothing design of the Victorian era? How does the music of the 1920鈥檚 effect dance, and in turn, clothing styles? How do the political and economic realities of the Great depression impact fabric usage during the 1930鈥檚?听 Historical overview of costumes will be enhanced by embodied learning and an inquisitive look at the link between clothing and the culture that created them.听

罢别虫迟蝉:听none required. 听

Evaluation:听attendance/participation 10%, theory and practice assignment 10%, oral presentations 40% (two presentations worth 20% each), mid term quiz 10%, essay or creative project 20%, end of term quiz 10%.

Format:听Classes alternate between lectures by the instructor and oral presentations by the students.听听

Enrollment: cap of 25 students

Prerequisites: None.

Expected Student Preparation: Familiarity with the basic concepts of literary and/or cultural theory will be very useful.听 听 听 听 听

Description:听This course will critically examine the efforts within the Marxist tradition to theorize literary and cultural production. After starting with an overview of Marxism as a system of thought, we will trace the critical formulations of various Marxist theorists as they address the aesthetic modes of realism, modernism, and postmodernism鈥攎odes whose periods of cultural dominance correspond, Fredric Jameson and others have suggested, to different stages in the development of the capitalist mode of production. As we follow a somewhat chronological itinerary through the critical debates each of these aesthetic modes has occasioned, we will also engage with Marxism鈥檚 dialogue (and sometimes conflict) with other critical traditions, such as feminism and postcolonial studies. Throughout the term, we will also examine some primary works of literary and cultural production to 鈥渢est out鈥� the claims of these theorists. The guiding metaphor for our inquiries will be that of base and superstructure: How are literary and cultural productions related to the realm of economic production? What role does the study of aesthetic form have in Marxist analysis? What is the role of culture in capitalism? Our inquiries will be undertaken in a collaborative, rather than competitive spirit, even as we pursue what Marx once called the 鈥渞uthless criticism of all that exists.鈥�

罢别虫迟蝉:听

Marx for Beginners, Ruis
Marxist Literary Theory, eds. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne
Aesthetics & Politics, Theodor Adorno et al
P猫re Goriot, Honor茅 de Balzac (Norton Critical Edition)
Foe, J.M. Coetzee
Tout va bien, dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Fight Club, dir. David Fincher
Course pack with essays by Fredric Jameson, Colin MacCabe, Heidi Hartmann, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Fred Pfeil, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Lauren Berlant, and others

Evaluation:听Short response papers, 12-15pp final paper, course participation

Format:听Lecture, discussion