ENGL 332-002
“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. […]
ENGL 224-001
“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.
Registering for 2020W?
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.
Visiting Speakers Series – A. Naomi Paik
October 21, 2020 Zoom lecture by A. Naomi Paik on 21 October 2020, which will begin at 3 PM Pacific / 5 PM Central Zoom meeting login details will be provided upon RSVP (we ask attendees to RSVP individually and avoid forwarding the meeting details to others)
ENGL 244-001
“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?
ENGL 248-001
“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.
ENGL 231-001
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.
ENGL 223-002
“‘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 […]
ENGL 353-001
“So Much Drama! 18th-Century Theatre
After the silence of the Puritan Commonwealth, London’s theatres burst into social, artistic and ideological prominence in the long eighteenth century. Through heroic drama, tragedy, burlesque, laughing comedy, weeping comedy, plays contributed to cultural dialogues on the relative identities of the nation and the individual through such conflicting elements as noble heroics, razor wit, political subversion, historical revisionism, and some rather explicit sex.[…]
Sessional Lecturer Positions
We invite applications for part-time Sessional Lecturer appointments (undergraduate literature courses) for the academic year 2020-2021.
