This version of the 平特五不中 Department of English, Undergraduate Studies site is deprecated but has been preserved for archival reasons. The information on this site is not up to date and should not be consulted. Students, faculty, and staff should consult the new site using the link below.
All 500-level courses and a certain number of 200-, 300- and 400-level courses have limited enrolment and require instructors' permission. Students hoping to enroll in these courses should consult the course descriptions on the Department of English website for the procedures for applying for admission.听
ENGL 202 Departmental Survey of English Literature I
Professor Maggie Kilgour
Fall 2018
MWF 11:30-12:30
Full course description
Prerequisite: Open only to English Majors and Minors, or by special written permission of instructor.听
听Description: Required for English Majors and Minors, ENGL 202 is foundational to further study of literature in the department of English. Through readings of and lectures/discussions on a range of major non-dramatic听works from the Anglo Saxon period to the mid 18th century, it introduces students to English literary history, while reflecting upon the meaning of tradition, the idea of a canon and of literary history, the concept of 鈥淓nglishness,鈥 and the significance and purpose of literature. We will trace the development through time of specific literary forms and genres, including lyric, elegy, epic, satire, sonnet, romance, and pastoral. At the same time, we will consider the relation between literature and religion, politics, and culture broadly, asking why people read and write literature, and following the changing ideas of the writer and his/her role in society. This course gives students a knowledge of early literature in English that prepares them for more advanced and specialized study in the department. Class discussions (especially in conferences) and written assignments will help students develop skills of interpretation and communication.
Texts:听(texts are available at 平特五不中 Bookstore):
Norton Anthology of English Literature. Vol 1. 9th Edition.
Edmund Spenser鈥檚 Poetry. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Anne Lake Prescott and Andrew D. Hadfield. (Included with the Anthology if purchased at the Bookstore)
The Canadian Writer鈥檚 Handbook. 6th Edition. Ed. William E. Messenger et al.听Toronto: Oxford, 2015. (RECOMMENDED)
Evaluation:听20% mid-term; 40% 5-6 page term paper; 30% formal final exam;10% conference participation
Format: Lectures, conferences, discussion
ENGL 203听Departmental Survey of English Literature 2
Professor Allan Hepburn鈥
鈥Winter 2019
TRF 10:30-11:30
Full course description
Prerequisites and Anti-requisites: English 202 or permission of instructor. Limited to students in English programs only. Not open to students who have taken ENGL 201.
听Description: This course surveys English poetry and fiction written between the late eighteenth century and the twentieth century. For the sake of intelligibility, 鈥淓nglish鈥 should be understood to include British and Irish literature, with an occasional example of a writer who hails from elsewhere, such as the New Zealander Katherine Mansfield. We will ask how English literature models itself on traditions and perceived breaks with tradition. In this light, we will consider romantic, Victorian, modern, and contemporary works in a roughly chronological order. Students are required to read speedily, thoroughly, critically, and astutely. Even if these poems and narratives are somewhat familiar from high school or CEGEP courses, students should read them again. This course is intended to provide a sampling of the English literary tradition as a gateway to future study. Attention will be paid to form, cultural conditions of production, genre, content, gender, visual culture, labour and leisure, grief, children, and other topics.
Texts:
Norton Anthology, 10th edition
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford)
鈥婥harles Dickens, Hard Times (Norton)
Evaluation (tentative): essay one 25%; essay two 25%; attendance and participation 15%; final exam: 35%
Format: Lecture and conference
ENGL 225 American Literature I
Professor Peter Gibian
Winter 2019
鈥MWF 12:30-1:30 (with weekly conference sections replacing most Friday lectures)
Full course description
听Prerequisite: none
Description: A survey of American literature from its beginnings to the Civil War (1860). While we may begin with early writing鈥擭ative Americans, explorers, Puritans, or 18th-century figures such as Benjamin Franklin, for example鈥攖he main emphasis will be on literature from the first half of the 19th century: authors such as Irving, Douglass, and Stowe, with a special focus on the major writers of the 鈥淎merican Renaissance鈥--Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Dickinson. Particular attention will be paid to representative American themes, forms, and literary techniques. No attempt will be made to cover all major writers or writings.
Texts:
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography and Other Writings
The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 8th edition, Vol. B (1820-1865)
Evaluation (tentative): 20% mid-term exam; 25% essay; 15% conference participation; 40% final exam. (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 weekly conferences
ENGL 227 American Literature 3
The Indigenous American Berserk: U.S. Fiction since 1945鈥
Instructor听鈥婥urtis Brown
Fall 2018
鈥TR 16:00-17:30
Full course description
Description: A survey of the American novel from 1945 to turn of century, tracing continuities and disruptions both formal and thematic. Topics will include postwar triumphalism and its discontents; the legacies of modernism and romanticism; anxieties of lineage, whether literary, familial, tribal, or regional; the pressure of technology on the forms and idioms of the novel; oral performance and other sources of vernacular energy in the changing American language; the emerging opposition of 鈥渉ighbrow鈥 and consumer culture; the American spatial imaginary (city, suburb, network, frontier); the formal tensions between novels of culture and novels of individual consciousness; and the ideological tension between universalist claims and particular identities.
Texts:
Jane Bowles, Two Serious Ladies
Robert Penn Warren, All the King鈥檚 Men
Flannery O鈥機onnor, Wise Blood
James Baldwin, Giovanni鈥檚 Room
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Saul Bellow, Herzog
Marylinne Robinson, Housekeeping
Toni Morrison,听Beloved
Philip Roth, Sabbath鈥檚 Theater
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
Evaluation:听Attendance and participation, 10%; 4-page essay, 20%; 6-8-page essay, 35%; final exam, 35%.
Format: lectures and conferences
ENGL 229 Introduction to Canadian Literature 2
Professor Robert Lecker
Winter 2019
TR 13:00-14:30
Full course description
Prerequisite:听None
听Description: A survey of English Canadian poetry and prose from the Second World War to the present. We will read poetry and short fiction to explore the development of Canadian literature. In addition to looking at the work of specific authors from 1945 to the present, the lectures will cover such topics as Canadian literary nationalism, realism, postmodernism, and different forms of experimentation. We will also look at the idea of nordicity as a central metaphor in Canadian writing and discuss the economic and cultural forces accounting for the construction of a national literature.听
Texts:听Lecker, Robert, ed. Open Country: Canadian Literature in English. Toronto: Nelson, 2007.鈥
Evaluation:听TBA.
Format: Lecture.
ENGL 230 Introduction to Theatre Studies
Instructor Willow White
Fall 2018
TR 14:30-16:00
Full course description
听Description:听TBA
Texts: TBA
Evaluation:听TBA
Format: lectures, conferences
ENGL 237听Introduction to Study of a Literary Form
The Novel
Dr听Keelan Harkin
Winter 2019
MWF 11:35-12:25, including weekly conference sections
Full course description
听Description: This course will serve as an introduction to a few of the elements, characteristics, and conventions that define the novel as a form. While the novels will be read in chronological order, our discussions will emphasise the formal dimensions of the works. The novels cover a diverse range of styles, subgenres, and types of stories. We will encounter monsters, ghosts, and visions of hell; we will also encounter stories of childhood trauma and the development of an artist. The novels studied in this course constantly skirt between the mundane and the fantastical. Students are asked to reflect on how a novel represents its world, and how that representation challenges our assumptions and perceptions of our own world. The six novels covered in this course are from 19th-21st century Britain, Ireland, or the United States. Representative rather than exhaustive, these novels present an introduction into a number of important features and genres that will be of use in upper-year courses. Lectures, conferences, and in-class assignments will provide students with an overview of key terminology to enhance their formal reading comprehension of this major literary form. Because these novels represent worlds adjacent to the 鈥渞eal鈥 world, we will also examine how historical and political contexts complement our readings of formal qualities in the works.听听
Texts:听(subject to change)
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein
Henry James. The Turn of the Screw
James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Shirley Jackson. We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Toni Morrison. Sula
Anne Enright. The Gathering
Evaluation:听TBA
Format: Lecture and conferences
ENGL 269 Introduction to Performance
Professor Sean Carney
Winter 2019
MW 11:00-13:00
Full course description
Prerequisite:听This class is restricted to declared Majors in Drama and Theatre who have completed or are completing ENGL 230 and ENGL 355. Admission is by permission of the instructor only: sean.carney [at] mcgill.ca
听Description: This course will introduce you to basic tools and techniques used in acting, improvisation, and dramatic analysis.听 You will develop vocal and physical warm-ups, learn about breath support and a free and placed voice, explore the performance of Shakespeare monologues, participate in improvisation exercises, explore spontaneity, imagination and creativity, learn about the analysis of a contemporary dramatic script and the use of that analysis in the actor鈥檚 work.听 Throughout the course you will be asked to commit fully to the class, the group and the process, and you will be expected to work on your own, outside of class, rehearsing your monologues and scenes.
Texts: TBD
Evaluation: A combination of class participation (various exercises and presentations totaling approximately 50% of the evaluation) and various types of written assignments (approximately 50% of the evaluation).
Format: Group discussions, practical exercises, class presentations
ENGL 275 Introduction to Cultural Studies听
Professor Richard So
Fall 20178
MWF 11:30-12:30
Full course description
听Description:听TBA
Texts: TBA
Evaluation:听TBA
Format: lecture, weekly TA-led conferences
ENGL 277 Introduction to Film Studies
Professor Ned Schantz
Fall 2018
MWF 16:30-17:30 (plus screenings)
Full course description
听Description: This course is designed to prepare students for future film courses at 平特五不中.听 It is therefore dedicated to three main goals: establishing a frame of reference for the history of film and film theory, introducing key analytical concepts and skills, and inspiring an ongoing interest in film.
This course is restricted to Cultural Studies majors/minors and Film Studies minors.
Texts: coursepack
Evaluation: quiz 10%, 3-4 page paper 15%, 5-6 page paper 25%, conferences 15%, posted class notes 5%, final 30%
Format: lecture and conferences plus weekly screenings
ENGL 280听Introduction to Film as Mass Medium
Dr. Josie Torres Barth
Winter 2019
MWF 13:30-14:30
Full course description
听Description:听 Popular media and their technologies of exhibition and consumption shape our daily experience, our sense of the space around us, and our relationship to the world both inside and outside our homes.In this course, we will study film as a mass medium by examininghow film represents other media鈥攁nd its own medium. Wewill tracethe evolving experience of new media as various forms of virtual experience, from early film to contemporary reality-based and social media. We will examine what new forms of perception these media made possible, what kinds of tensions they brought to light, and how new media technologies change people鈥檚 relationships to space and to each other.We will trace shifts in exhibition and consumption practices, such as the private experience of in-home entertainment provided by radio and TV, whichpromise unprecedented connection and simultaneous experience, but also open the home to the threats the outside world presents. We will ask how various media represent鈥攁nd create鈥攔eality, in films about news media and reality TV, and examine what media films tell us about our relationship with the technologies that increasingly shape our daily experience.Throughout the course, we will pay special attention to the shifting relationships between the individual, the home, and the public sphere, as popular media鈥檚 address becomes both more private and more mobile.
By the end of the course, students will be able to situate developments in mass media forms and technologies in their wider social and historical context.
Possible course texts:
Selected early short films
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Lang, 1933)
Modern Times (Chaplin, 1936)
Sorry, Wrong Number (Litvak, 1948)
Selected radio plays
Singin鈥 in the Rain (Donen, 1952)
Ace in the Hole (Wilder, 1951)
A Face in the Crowd (Kazan, 1957)
Selected TV episodes
Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982)
The Ri The Ring (Verbinski, 2002)
Real Life (Brooks, 1979)
Unfriended (Gabriadze, 2014)
Her (Jonze, 2013)
Eighth Grade (Burnham, 2018)
Evaluation: TBA
Format: Lectures, discussions, conferences, and screenings
ENGL 297听Introduction to Postcolonial and World Literature听
Professor Sandeep Banerjee鈥
Winter 2019
MW 10:00-11:30
Full course description
听Description:听This course provides a critical introduction to the field of postcolonial and world literature studies, drawing specifically on texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. We will examine how these authors conceptualize and represent their lifeworlds and ideas about community, family, history, space, gender, race, and class in their works. As we read these texts we will query the various 鈥 and often contested 鈥 meanings of the term 鈥減ostcolonial鈥 and ask how it relates to categories such as 鈥渁nti-colonial鈥 and 鈥渃olonial.鈥 The course will also familiarize students with some of the key concepts from postcolonial theory (for instance, 鈥渙rientalism鈥 and 鈥渢he subaltern鈥). The course offers the fundaments of the field and prepares students for further study in postcolonial and world literature.
NOTE: Attendance to film screening(s) and conference(s) is mandatory.
Texts:听
- Aime Cesaire 鈥 Discourse on Colonialism
- Chinhua Achebe 鈥 Things Fall Apart
- Khushwant Singh 鈥 Train to Pakistan
- Buchi Emecheta 鈥 Second-Class Citizen
- Salman Rushdie 鈥 Haroun and the Sea of Stories
- Film: Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (Dir: Satyajit Ray, 1969)
Evaluation:听Attendance; assignment; midterm; final paper
Format: Lectures, discussions, conferences, and screenings