"Approaches to Media History" In this course, we zoom out to an overview of media history by looking at three interlocking regions: systems, matter or materialism and the digital platform. We will examine the relationship between media, social organization, and power, from the early writing systems that ordered agriculture to the nineteenth and twentieth-century relation between ideology and mass media such as television. We will look at the technologies themselves, such as pig skin manuscripts, paper, the substance of film, and the environmental implications of devices such as smartphones. [...]
"Magic, Border Crossing, and Postcolonial Imaginings" This course delves into the wonder, pain, and possibilities of storytelling in works set in Australia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Jamaica, and India, as well as in spaces of transit and transformation. The use of magic realism, myth, and speculative fantasy will take us on a journey to a variety of worlds, where borders blur and new voices and agencies emerge.
Did you know that the course descriptions we've provided here are more detailed than the course descriptions in the UBC Calendar or listed on the SSC? Feel free to look through to find courses you're interested in.
"Reading Animality" How do we define the human by excluding the animal? How do racial, sexual, and other forms of difference overlap with human-animal difference in contemporary literature and culture?
"Whodunit? The Golden Age of Detective Fiction" This course introduces students to representative texts in the British tradition of detective fiction that flourished in the genre’s formative era from the mid-Victorian period to the “golden age” of crime fiction in the 1920s and 30s. It seeks to explore that enduring appeal by reading our texts with an eye not only to their historical and political frameworks, but also to their engagement with such concepts as knowledge, identity, truth, and rationality.
Introduction to Indigenous Literatures This course will examine contemporary articulations of Indigenous identity, politics and cultural traditions in the field of literature, through the genres of the novel, poetry, plays/drama, film, and other modes of resurgent cultural expression.
"‘I would Prefer Not To’: Work in US Literature" One of COVID-19’s effects has been to complicate our relationship with work. In the US, unemployment rates have shot up, “essential” labour is being redefined and in many cases coerced, and labour activism is on the rise. This course will shed light on current struggles by looking to the US’s rich history of literature about work [...]
We invite applications for part-time Sessional Lecturer appointments (undergraduate literature courses) for the academic year 2020-2021.
We are delighted to announce that Gisèle Baxter is year's recipient of the Ian Fairclough Teaching Prize. [...]
Congratulations to Dr. Ira Nadel on receiving the Dean of Arts Award for 2019-2020. [...]
Department Bookshelf | Explore Our Bookshelf »
Speechsong – The Gould/Schoenberg Dialogues
Richard Cavell
Historians on John Gower
Edited by Stephen Rigby with Siân Echard
Ovidian Transversions, ‘Iphis and Ianthe’, 1300-1650
Edited by Valerie Traub - Patricia Badir and Peggy McCracken
Creating Canadian English: The Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English
Stefan Dollinger
The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction
Zachary Lesser (Editor) - Daniel Allington - David A. Brewer - Stephen Colclough and Siân Echard
The Pluricentricity Debate
Stefan Dollinger
Premodern Ecologies in the Modern Literary Imagination
Edited by Vin Nardizzi and Tiffany Jo Werth
Canadian Literature
Laura Moss
Why Indigenous Literatures Matter
Daniel Justice
