Oscar Wilde’s Paris: Legends and Legacies

Oscar Wilde’s Paris: Legends and Legacies

Colette Colligan and Gregory Mackie

University of Toronto Press

2025

Oscar Wilde’s Paris: Legends and Legacies chronicles Wilde’s lifelong relationship with the French capital, the city he called “the most wonderful city in the world,” and the site of his rise to literary fame, self-imposed exile, and eventual death.

Focused on the 1880s to the 1940s, editors Colette Colligan and Gregory Mackie shed light on this vibrant, transnational chapter of Wilde’s life and legacy. Contributors document how his relationship with the city developed in literature, journalism, and the visual arts, as well as in the city’s famous cafés, bars, restaurants, hotels, and cemeteries.

This collection highlights three touchstones in the relationship between Wilde and Paris: his Parisian self-fashioning, the impact of the city’s cultural scene on his career, and his legacy’s absorption into the myth of Paris as a place of artistic and sexual freedom.

Whether Wilde is viewed as ambitious aesthete, Francophile flâneur, or disreputable expatriate, Oscar Wilde’s Paris tells the story of how one man’s life became intertwined with the cultural imagination of a city, and how that city, in turn, claimed him as its own.

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About the Editors

Colette Colligan and Gregory Mackie

Colette Colligan is a professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Angers in France.

Gregory Mackie

Gregory Mackie is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures and the Norman Colbeck Curator of Rare Books at the University of British Columbia.

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2026 Winter

NOTE: Schedule subject to change
As of February 2, 2026
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Translating the Middle Ages  

Term 1 
MON, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 

“‘I have been a stranger in a strange land,’ but the land of my sojourning cannot bear me…Nu?” So we took off by ourselves and stayed together two whole years. Me, I was ready to stay with him for the rest of my life, but better you should ask for the moon from heaven.

Al-Ḥārith, fictional admirer of the brilliant con artist Abū Zayd and the speaker above, appears in al-Ḥarīrī of Basra’s maqāmāt, written in Arabic around 1100. Yet in the passage above, one of fifty award-winning experimental mini-translations of al-Ḥarīrī by Michael Cooperson, he speaks a New York English inflected with Yiddish, an exaggerated twentieth-century Jewish-American vernacular. How did this come to be and what does it tell us about medieval histories of Jewish and Islamic literary intimacy? For that matter, why are there so many recent, experimental English-language translations of medieval Arabic literature and of other medieval literature? How did we get a queer, postcolonial version of the Old English Seafarer, and a fascist, modernist one? How long has this wave of literary translations been going on? What are its ethics? What does translation theory help us understand about medieval literature and all literature, about diaspora and multilingualism, and about the role of poetics in civic life in the present moment?

In this graduate seminar, students will learn to write a conference paper and present at a conference. They will also have the opportunity and be encouraged to use languages other than English. Primary texts will likely include translations by Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Zadie Smith, Alasdair Gray, Meagan Purvis, Yasmine Seale, Ezra Pound, Juan Gelman, Denis Ferhatovič and others. Secondary readings will likely include medieval translation theory and modern selections by Jhumpa Lahiri, Stuart Hall, Vladimir Nabokov, Lawrence Venuti, Isabel C. Gómez, David Gramling, and many others. Readings may also be shaped by student interest and linguistic background.

Term 2 
MON, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

Shakespeare, Race, and Feeling  

This seminar will examine the intersection of race and feeling in works by William Shakespeare. We will consider how Shakespeare’s plays and narrative poetry produce feelings about non-white people, and how such feelings participate in the production of racial difference, especially whiteness. We will investigate the work Shakespeare’s plays and poetry did within what scholars of emotion call “emotional communities”—composed of people who are moved by similar interests and values—to both produce and destabilize race as a concept. Our Shakespearean works will be Titus Andronicus, The Rape of Lucrece, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. 

Term 1 
THU, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM 

Bodies: Person, Flesh, Thing  

The basic premise of the course is that bodies are natural and social, biological and cultural. We have our bodies and we are our bodies. Bodies are both voluntary and involuntary. Our current understanding that the boundaries of one’s self are coextensive with the boundaries of one’s body had its origins in the eighteenth century. Using a broadly historical approach, we will begin with Richardson’s epistolary narrative Pamela (1740) and John Cleland’s 1747 pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to consider bodily privacy and its invasions. From there, we will move on to slavery, judicial torture, and incarceration as systems that reduce persons to things and flesh. Readings: Mary Prince’s slave narrative The History of Mary Prince; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; Jean Amery’s memoir At the Mind’s Limits; James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk. Finally, to develop the idea that bodies are subject not only to intentional harm, but also to involuntary forces such as sickness or impairment, the class will end with two texts on illness. Critical and theoretical excerpts will be drawn from the work of Hortense Spillers, Didier Fassin, and Jay Bernstein. Requirements: regular attendance and participation; Canvas posts; one 5-page book review; and a final essay.

Term 1 
WED, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

[specific title forthcoming]  

While rhetorical studies has long engaged disability on issues of access and accessibility, scholars such as Tara Wood, Jay Dolmage, Margaret Price, and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (2014) have urged the field to “move beyond mere lists and individual accommodations.” This seminar sets out to explore that “beyond,” teasing out the conflicts and potentials embedded at the intersection of disability, rhetoric, and activism. Over the course of the semester, we will ask two, interanimating questions: in what ways can we write about and theorize disability rhetorically? And in what ways might experiences of disability “crip” our understanding of rhetoric and rhetorical theory?

Importantly, disability is an embodied experience (rather than a purely theoretical exercise), which means our readings will include a combination of genres, such as memoir, fiction, theory, and graphic literature, that speak to disability’s materiality. The course assignments, too, will demand a kind of engagement with the world of disability that exceeds traditional library research and a final paper. These assignments ask you to take up Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s call to “start noticing” disability in your lives outside of school. Noticing disability is a rhetorical task because it involves rescripting the discourses that we use to name and address bodymind difference. Indeed, this course sits delicately on the border of theory and praxis, urging us to take up scholar-activism by reimagining disability and rhetoric in all aspects of our lives. As this seminar will make clear, studying crip rhetorics requires a commitment to disability liberation.

Term 1 
TUE, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM 

Modernism and the Mass Body 

This seminar course in modernist literature and social theory explores fictional, empirical, and theoretical variations on the historical and narrated worlds of the collectivity, its marginalized and its revolutionists. We will examine theories and case studies of crowds, paradigmatic figures in modern and contemporary fiction, and collective forms of identity, those through which the “core of the self” extends outward, acquiring new repertoires of experience. We will explore theories of agency and layered sovereignties, and phenomena such as group aggression and utopianism, the sophisticated judgments of crowds, populisms and authoritarianisms, bare life and biopolitics. Readings include Woolf, Joyce, Conrad, Eliot, Barnes, Le Bon, Moscovici, Laclau, Ranciere, Hardt and Negri, Raymond Williams, Freud, Bion, Rose, Lacan.

Term 2 
TUE, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 

Fictions of London 

“Neither of us is English, we’re Londoners you see”
--Sammy, in Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

This course will attempt to chart the urban and fictional landscape of the former imperial metropolis and conceptualize a London uneasily situated at the intersection of the material and the imaginary. We will read, watch, and listen to a selection of novels, poetry, films, photographs and recordings from the mid-1950s to the present, and attempt to address such issues as the representation of space in former imperial, now global, centers, and the processes of change (cultural, social, political, aesthetic) that such representations both respond to and produce. We will debate the extent to which these fictions of London are intimately bound up not only with migrant and diasporic, colonial and postcolonial identities, but also with increasing, and in some instances highly troubled, political and cultural ties to Europe and America. Our aim will be to consider London as a complex and conflicted space of intercultural exchange where social and material inequalities are constantly challenged and resisted in imaginative representations within both literary and popular cultural forms.

Tentative list of primary texts: works by Sam Selvon, Colin MacInnes, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Laura Oldfield Ford, Raymond Ontrobus, Derek Jarman, Mike Leigh, Hanif Kureishi, Patrick Keiller, Gilbert & George, Monica Ali, and Zadie Smith. Tentative list of secondary readings: writings by Iain Sinclair, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Stuart Hall, John McLeod, Edward Soja, and others.

Term 2 
TUE, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

Contemporary U.S. Novel: DeLillo, Morrison, Lee 

This seminar will examine in depth works from the 1970s to the 2010s by three of the great U.S. novelists: Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Chang-rae Lee. Readings will include most or all of the following texts: DeLillo’s The Names (1982), Libra (1988), and Mao II; Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz (1993), and Paradise (1997); and Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), and On Such a Full Sea (2014).

Our goal will in part be to understand 40 to 50 years of literary and cultural history through figures who, in their monumental power and reach, tend to embody certain periodizing and otherwise explanatory categories but also trouble their boundaries and distinctions, whether those categories be (to name only a few) modernism, postmodernism, paranoia, twentieth-century African American novels, contemporary U.S. literature, historical fiction, transnational U.S. fiction, or immigrant writing. We will also be on the lookout for hidden symmetries and unexpected lines of influence among these writers.

The focus will be on close examination of the novels and on two major writing assignments by each student: a seminar paper of about five pages that will form the basis of discussion in most weeks; and a final research paper at the end of term. Students will also lead discussion in selected weeks and write discussion posts. Essays from each novelist will be part of our reading, and criticism on the syllabus, invoking a wide range of theoretical paradigms, will come from Colleen Lye, Jodi Kim, David Cowart, John McClure, Chris Lee, Lavinia Delois Jennings, Jean Wyatt, John K. Young, Amy Hungerford, and others.

Term 2 
WED, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM 

Language standards and inclusivity: theory & practice 

This seminar probes theories of linguistic standardization with the express goal of putting them into practice, while using this practice to further inform theory. The corresponding fields of comparative standardology and linguistic standardization are relatively young in their own rights as academic subjects. Their aim to dehegemonize and decolonize contemporary standard varieties, which has become a goal often talked about but rarely put into practice.

We work with current language theory (whether linguistic, rhetorical or otherwise) and sociohistorical approaches to explore concrete, practicable ways to dehegemonize and decolonize western standard (written) varieties in their contexts, starting with Standard Canadian English. Such standard varieties, hailing virtually without exception from imperial-colonial contexts, are all in need of “opening up”, whether via demotization (widening of the standard) or destandardization (replacement of an existing standard) or a combination thereof.

The question of how the dehegemonization is conducted in concrete social contexts is at the vanguard of current work. This seminar is therefore part of the UBC Research Excellence Cluster on Inclusive Standards (see www.canadianwordcentre.ubc.ca for more). A range of additional events (e.g. Research seminar meetings, Open Townhall-Type Faculty Clubs) accompanies this seminar.

Everyone with an interest in standard language and/or inclusion is welcome. No linguistic knowledge is required (but of course most welcome). An openness to view English as reflected in or department’s name (English Language[s] & Literatures), however, is essential.

Participants have the opportunity to do innovative work on an aspect of inclusivity in the context of the Canadian English Dictionary, the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical or, more abstract, theoretical work for the Canadian Word Centre. You may choose to work on another variety of World Englishes (e.g. American English or Jamaican Englishes) or Global Englishes (English as a Lingua Franca), or, if you have a concrete connection, a non-English language.

There is the option to partake with your seminar paper in a thematic collection of papers on Inclusive Linguistic Standard Varieties: Standardization for the 2020s with a major publisher.

The guiding question will be: how can we best distinguish between

  • theoretical approaches that are ideal but perhaps unrealistic to be put into practice (lack of user uptake)

and

  • best practices for “inclusive standards” that may not be ideal but would bring inclusive standards more into the centre of linguistic debate.

 

Optional readings and podcasts in preparation for this seminar:

 

Some scholarly sources for illustration:

Ayers-Bennett, Wendy. 2020. From Haugen’s codification to Thomas’s purism: assessing the role of description and prescription, prescriptivism and purism in linguistic standardization. Language Policy 19, 183–213.

Aryes-Bennett, Wendy & John Bellamy (eds.) 2021. The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Costa-Carreras, Joan. 2025. On the Epistemological Status of Comparative Standardology and Standardisation. Caplletra: Revista Internacional de Filologia 78: 249–270.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2019. The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and Other Germanic Standard Varieties. London: Routledge.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2025. Dialectology as “language making”: hegemonic disciplinary discourse and the One Standard German Axiom (OSGA). In (Dia)lects in the 21st Century: Selected Papers from Methods in Dialectology XVII (Mainz, 2022), ed. by Susanne Wagner & Ulrike Stange-Hundsdörfer, 287–318. Berlin: LangSci Press.

Haugen, Einar. 1966. Language Conflict and Language Planning: the Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Horner, Kristine & John Bellamy. 2016. Beyond the micro–macro interface in language and identity research. In Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity, ed. by Siân Preece. London: Routledge.

Joseph, John E. 2006. Language and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Joseph, John E., Gijsbert Rutten & Rik Vosters. 2020. Dialect, language & nation: 50 years on. Language Policy 19: 161–182.

Muhr, Rudolf & Juan Thomas (eds.). 2020. Pluricentric Theory beyond Dominance and Non-dominance. Graz: PCL-Press.

Oakes, Leigh & Jane Warren. 2007. Language, Citizenship and Identity in Quebec. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Oakes, Leigh & Yael Peled. 2018. Normative Language Policy: Ethics, Politics, Principles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Term 2 
WED, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

Eating the Text: Reading Culture Through Food, Cooking, and Eating 

Food, cooking, and eating are biologically necessary and socially powerful:

we produce and cook food to survive, but also to reinforce social bonds, to celebrate tradition, to evoke memories of home, to compete with other cooks, to impress the eater, and even to beguile and seduce.

This course will explore food in literature, particularly life narratives, cookbook selections, and films across different cultures and borders, from the transnational to local Vancouver contexts. The production of food is essentially linked to histories of empire, colonial power, capital, racialized and gendered labour, and ecological change. Our discussions will explore these intersections.

Readings will include selections from Gitanjali Shahani (Food and Literature), Sandra Gilbert (The Culinary Imagination), Rachel Laudan (Cuisine and Empire), Sidney Mintz (Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History), Nathalie Cooke and Shelley Boyd with Alexia Moyer(Canadian Literary Fare), Monique Truong (The Book of Salt), MFK Fisher (How to Cook a Wolf), Cheuk Kwan (Have You Eaten Yet?), Fred Wah (Diamond Grill), and Austin Clarke (Pigtails ‘n’ Breadfruit). Films will include Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, Juzo Itami's Japanese "noodle western" Tampopo, Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman, and the restaurant documentaries of Cheuk Kwan.

Term 1 
FRI, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM 

Cold War Legacies in Asia and the Asian Americas 

The period post-WWII until the 1980s is conventionally understood in the West as the Cold War. Marked by events such as the Cuban missile crisis, the war in Vietnam, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, these years are remembered as a tense time when it seemed that the conflict between communist and capitalist democratic ideologies might result in the outbreak of nuclear war. At the same time, it is important to remember that these same tensions played out very differently in Asia and took the form of multiple bloody and violent wars.  This course will return to this historical period in order to rethink what is conventionally remembered in the West as a conflict between the US and the USSR as a struggle that also involved—and, indeed, was staged in—Asia.

We will consider the legacies of these hot wars in Asia as they have been experienced in Asian North America and critiqued by diasporic and transpacific scholars, writers, and filmmakers. Our readings will be drawn from various fields that include Asian diaspora studies, critical refugee studies, inter-Asian cultural studies, Indigenous studies, Asian Canadian and Asian American studies, and transpacific critique. We will ask how, what critic Jodi Kim calls the “protracted afterlife” of the Cold War, continues to influence current conversations about migration, citizenship, human rights, race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and imperialism.

Term 2 
THU, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM 

The Postcolonial Incredible 

The African cultural theorist Tejumola Olaniyan describes the disenchantment of the postcolonial subject after colonialism as “the postcolonial incredible.” He characterizes this situation as marked by “an outlandish infraction of ‘normality’ and its limits.” This course sits with that characterization of the postcolonial. We will proceed with two aims in mind. The first is to consider the term “postcolonial.” We will discuss the postcolonial condition through the works of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Anthony Appiah, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Achille Mbembe. As we sit with these thinkers, we will ask the following questions of the postcolonial: What is the post in postcolonial? Who inhabits the postcolonial? How is the postcolonial inhabited? Having sorted through all this, we will turn to the second aim of this course: exploring the specific condition of the postcolonial which has been termed “the postcolonial incredible”—political situations in which the postcolonial state is characterized by unbelievable events. Under the rubric of the postcolonial incredible, we will study postcolonial texts such as Femi Osofisan’s Kolera Kolej, Ola Rotimi’s Holding Talks, Jane Taylor’s Ubu and the Truth Commission, Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross, and S. Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half. 

Term 1 
TUE, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM 

[specific title forthcoming]

[specific description forthcoming]

Term 1 
WED, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM 

This seminar will explore advanced topics in gender and sexuality. Please contact english.graduate.program@ubc.ca for a full course description.

Term 2 
FRI, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 

Writing the American Self in the Long 19th Century 

This seminar is organized around the theme of the self­–self-making, self-deception, self-reliance, self-expression, self-deception, self-representation-–in US literature from the long nineteenth century. We will begin with a hip hop opera based on the biography of the US’s first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, one of the first self-made men in America. We will then read nonfiction about self-reliance by an early environmentalist (Thoreau) and a philosopher (Emerson); fiction about self-deceptive (Melville); lyric (self-expressive) poetry by Whitman and Dickinson; life-writing by a formerly enslaved person (Jacobs) and the first Asian North American author (Sui Sin Far); followed by a novel written not by an individual but by a collective of authors. The last few weeks of the course will focus on two contemporary works of multi-generational life-writing (Chin and Graver).

PRIMARY TEXTS WILL INCLUDE: 

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution 

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “American Scholar”

Selections from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself

Selections from Emily Dickinson’s poetry

Henry David Thoreau’s memoir, Walden (1854)

Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno (1852)

Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

Selections from Sui Sin Far’s works

Elizabeth Jordan, editor, The Sturdy Oak

Ava Chin, Mott Street: The Story of Belonging: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming

Elizabeth Graver, Kantika 

Term 2 
MON, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM 

Nineteenth-Century Literature and Technology 

Technologies emerged in the nineteenth century that transformed conceptions of time, space, and the self, and influenced the form and content of literary texts. Trains, and later automobiles, allowed for rapid travel; electricity illuminated cities, altering perceptions of the relations between night and day; the telegraph enabled instantaneous, seemingly incorporeal, communication across distances; sound recording and wireless delivered disembodied voices. Environmental movements grew up in response to industrial technologies. New technologies were also crucial tools of imperialism and globalization, and of resistance to them.

In this seminar, we will consider the ways in which emerging technologies of communication, recording, perception, transportation, industry, medicine, and war altered nineteenth-century literature and culture. Topics discussed will include technology and consciousness, technology and perception, globalization and imperialism, technology and race, industrialism and the environment, the emerging genre of science fiction, automata, technology and the supernatural (spiritual telegraphy, ghost photography), and technologies and disability.

Authors and texts will include Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, George Eliot, Flora Anna Steel, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, and H. G. Wells, along with critical readings from Marian Aguiar, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility; Long T. Bui, Model Machines; Louis Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics; and Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media; and M. Norton Wise, “The Gender of Automata in Victorian England.”

Term 1 
MON, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM 

Vancouver's Coasts 

Greater Vancouver is located at the estuarial meeting point of one of North America’s largest and most complex riverine watersheds, an oceanic basin (a sea, a straight, an inlet), a mountain range, and an archipelago. The complexities of this coastal ecology continually dog, confront, and challenge its image as Canada’s transcendental, gleaming, futuristic city of glass. Vancouver was also built on the unceded territory of three coastal nations and it shares a history of migrations and dispossessions with several continents to which it is still connected by ties of commerce, culture, and conflict. What does it mean to live, work, play, and thrive in such a place? This course will offer an interdisciplinary, multi-generic, and multi-media survey of writing from and about Vancouver’s coasts, their ecologies, and their colonialisms. The literary component of the course will feature poetry and stories by E. Pauline Johnson, Daphne Marlatt, Phinder Dulai, Rita Wong, Wayde Compton, and Lee Maracle, accompanied by selected readings from the field of coastal studies including the many philosophical, historical, aesthetic, and environmental approaches scholars bring to it. For some of our class meetings—and time permitting—the class will visit coastal sites described and discussed in our readings, such as Wreck Beach, Vancouver Harbour, Stanley Park, Kits Point (Senakw), and Steveston. Assignments will combine creative and critical skills and will include both a field report on a coastal Vancouver site and a final conference-length paper.

 

 

2026 Summer

NOTE: Schedule subject to change
As of January 20, 2026
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Term 2
MON & WED, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

This section of English 100 will introduce students to fundamental research questions in the literary disciplines by reading texts that dramatize the politics of representation in cross-cultural situations. Topics will range from the discovery of the “New World” to modern colonization and contemporary issues of migration and asylum. Primary texts will include William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains. These will be read alongside scholarly examples of literary theory, rhetoric, composition theory, philosophy, and postcolonial theory. Students will learn how to participate in the scholarly controversies that comprise the dynamic conversations of the university research community.

Points of (Literary) Connection

“an ocean and half a continent away from home, a drenching heat stirs rivers within me” - Haunani-Kay Trask (Hawaiian) “Returning the Gift”

Term 1
MON & WED, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

What kinds of connections are described and enacted in creative literary texts? What can we learn about connection, and its limits and possibilities, from reading? What links between texts, writers and sites become visible when look for them? How do some writers invite us to notice connections between places and issues we usually think about separately? Mostly (but not only) engaging Indigenous texts from around the world, in this course we will think together about some of the different forms that connection can take: literary map-making, creative collaborations, collections and networks, solidarities, and links between writing and other arts. In this course, we will read a range of poetry and short fiction, take a deep dive into Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poetry collection Iep Jāltok, visit some artworks on campus, and grapple with critical writing about how to read different forms, sites and histories of (literary) connection.

Term 1
TUE & THU, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

This course introduces students to the analytical skills and critical thinking essential to university-level literary reading, thinking and writing. Students will pursue hands-on practice of methods of literary analysis. Although we will write essays, please note that this is not course on writing (that’s ENGL 100 or WRDS 150): we’ll spend our time on fabulous literature rather than essay-writing instructions. There will be a midterm, a Term Paper, a Final Examination and some group projects that require both research and out-of-the box thinking. What will we read? We will look at some texts on monsters and the monstrous, which will include 2 novels, including The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. HydeThe Graveyard Book, a play version of one of the novels, and some short works. And remember: UBC Law, Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, and Education all require 6 credits of first year English, so 110 will prepare you for lots of future paths!

Literary Monsters and Monstrous Literature

Rey: “You are a monster.”
Kylo Ren: “Yes, I am.”
– Star Wars: The Last Jedi

“Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world” – Richard III 1.i

Term 2
TUE & THU, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

What is a monster? We know monsters from myths and legends, folktales, horror fiction and film. We know their variety: the grotesque, the beautiful, the terrifying, the pitiable, the sports of nature and the forces of evil. Dragons, werewolves, vampires, zombies, Frankenstein’s Creature, Dorian Gray, the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Marisa Coulter, many of the characters in The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones: they’re everywhere, from under the bed to the house next door to the battlefield, and right into a great deal of literature. Which leaves us here: in this section of 110 we’ll focus on how literary texts \use representations of monstrosity in ways that inspire both terror and horror, as well as (let’s be honest) fascination and even enjoyment.

We’ll start with William Shakespeare’s Richard III (a play that meditates on villainy and ambition in demonizing its subject for Tudor audiences, yet still fascinates contemporary ones) and at Ian McKellen’s 1995 film adaptation, which shifts the setting to an alternate-reality 1930s England where fascism takes hold. We will also consider various stage and screen adaptations as approaches to the play, including recent ones using race and gender-diverse casting, and sometimes featuring as Richard actors who are themselves physically disabled or disfigured. Other core texts include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There might be one or two short additional texts (such as Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”, as an introduction to the monologue form, to iambic pentameter, and to monstrosity).

Your writing assignments in this course (two essays and a final exam) will develop skills in both critical thinking and university-level literary textual analysis, and both are much more generally useful and applicable than you might think. I hope there will also be a lot of lively discussion, both in class and on our Canvas site.

Term 2
MON & WED, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Why has the bildungsroman, the coming-of-age narrative, been such a dominant part of post-independence African writing? Do children witness large-scale social changes in radically new ways? What does the genre tell us about the pressures shaping young African subjects? And what possibilities might the genre allow for?

In this course we’ll turn to a range of texts from the African continent that explore the complexities of growing up in rapidly changing societies. From Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions to the darkly comic Zambian film I Am Not a Witch, we’ll encounter a wide range of stories that challenge the idea of what “growing up” means on the world’s “youngest” continent.

Storying Place: Introduction to Reading Place and Power in Vancouver and BC

Term 2
TUE & THU, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Note: This course fulfills the new BA Ways of Knowing: Place and Power breadth requirement.

This course introduces students to reading literary and cultural representations of “place” as they intersect with practices of power in the context of the West Coast of what is currently called Canada. It examines works by local authors and artists from, about, or associated with Vancouver and BC, emerging from a variety of Indigenous, diaspora, and settler contexts. Theories of place will inform our approach to reading a range of positions and perspectives on literary Vancouver in works that address various geographic and communal places: from our local surroundings here at UBC’s Point Grey campus and Pacific Spirit Park, on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory; to Kitsilano, Main Street, Chinatown, Hogan’s Alley, the Downtown Eastside, and other past and present neighbourhoods in the city; to the coastal environments of the Pacific Northwest and the Salish Sea. Our guiding questions will be: What is “place”? How is it a way of seeing and understanding the world? How does literature function in the making of place(s), particularly as they become contested in the context of power? How have Indigenous and other communities historically marginalized in/by Vancouver mobilized cultural production in response to ongoing histories of settler-colonial erasure, racial exclusion, gentrification, and environmental disruption? How does reading “place” (including forms of displacement) make visible the intimate ways that dynamics of power are enacted, felt, embodied, resisted, and imagined by writers and communities?

We will take up these and other questions in this summer course by reading a variety of local literatures, looking to such narrative forms as short stories, novels, poetry, creative non-fiction, speculative fiction, and digital media. You will be invited to visit and interact with local places addressed by our texts, and if possible we will take advantage of the summer weather to make one or more class field trips to locations in Vancouver. Assignments will encourage you to understand yourself as variously “inside” the stories of place we study, enabling students to not only analyze place-based texts, but also engage with creative modes of inquiry inspired by your own relations to the course materials.

Term 1
MON & WED, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

In comics and graphic novels, the blank space between panels is called the “gutter.” It seems that nothing happens here; that there is an absence of meaning. It is the gutter, however, that demands the reader participate in constructing the story and its interpretations. Its blankness provides space for individual imagination. In a different sense of the gutter, it is a place where we expect to find trash, waste, or run-off, things that don’t belong to an idealized world. Until recently, graphic narratives occupied a cultural gutter, widely perceived as aesthetic run-off on its way to — or already in — the sewers.

This course pursues interpretive possibilities in both directions suggested by these understandings of the gutter. We will embrace graphic novels and comic books, shorts, and strips as combinations of text, image, and absence that offer unique, transformative opportunities for communication, empathy, and symbolism. We will survey the history of the production and reception of graphic narrative, tracking its development from the margins of the funny pages to a multi-billion dollar industry that transcends genres and includes some of the most thoughtful, serious literary texts of our time. We will read Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Shaun Tan’s Arrival, Ram V’s Many Deaths of Laila Starr, Will Eisner from Conversations with God, selections from the Moonshot collection of Indigenous graphic narrative, and Christopher Claremont’s X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills. What unique perspectives do these graphic narratives offer? How does the combination of image and text differently represent questions of identity and experience? What can be read in the bathetic contrast between panels depicting superheroes and cartoon animals and the infinite spaces of non-happening and un-meaning between them?

Term 1 - 2
Online, asynchronous

This online, asynchronous course explores and examines contemporary English phonology, morphology, parts of speech, and lexical (word) meaning. We begin with the study of distinct speech sounds and possible sound combinations in English. Students will study the International Phonetic Alphabet as it applies to current varieties of English. Next, we study the processes of word formation and word classification in English. We then study word meaning (lexical semantics) using a variety of approaches. The course is offered from a descriptive perspective and is not focused exclusively on any specific linguistic theory. There are three collaborative assignments, five quizzes, graded discussions for each module and a final exam.
Students will be working fully online on all the course work. There are Zoom meetings and recorded lectures at regular intervals. The final exam is online. Zoom office hours are by appointment.

Required reading:
Brinton, Laurel J. and Donna M. Brinton. The Linguistic Structure of Modern English. John Benjamins, 2010. ISBN 978 90 272 1172 9.

"Author's pen" and "actor's voice": Shakespeare in Text and Performance

Term 1 - 2
Online, asynchronous

This course will explore the extent to which we as readers of Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories, and comedies can remain engaged with his plays’ potential for realization onstage, in performance. Part of our focus will be historicist: we will consider the institutional and social conditions attendant upon the original productions of the plays, as well as the ways in which the plays themselves dramatize matters of affect and spectatorship. Our work will also explore the formal dramaturgy of the plays in order to think about how the texts register the nuance of performance in obvious ways (in stage directions and dialogue) and by appealing to the senses and to the emotions of a live audience. We will also look at the editing, printing, and publishing of the plays in order to think about how the page simultaneously encodes and distorts performance for modern readers. Whenever possible, we will consider the performance history of the plays, with a particular emphasis on how modern adaptations for the stage make use of (cut, modify, rearrange, reimagine) the playtext.

The Haunted Landscapes of Gothic Modern

Term 1
TUE & THU, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought” – Mrs. Dalloway

Modernism was born out of seismic, revolutionary shifts in society and culture. World wars, political revolutions in Europe and beyond, murderous civil and colonial/imperial wars, economic depression, and successive waves of technological modernization offering mixed psychological and social benefits and injuries laid siege to assumptions that the world was in any way well-ordered or reliably understood. Its literature both reflects conscious innovation and experiment and sometimes opposes these passions for change. Its obsessions respond in complex ways to those seismic shifts in its representations of gender and sexuality, social structures, race and culture, in all cases often in terms of transgression. And yet, in its drive to make things new, Modernist literature is often a haunted place: spectres of ancestry, of war, of places escaped from collide with the present moment, creating a dark, Gothic modernity. This troubled place will be our focus.

Assignments will include a midterm essay and a term paper (both requiring secondary academic research), as well as a final reflection essay to be written during the exam period.

Course texts include Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Broadview); Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison; D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; James Joyce, “The Dead”; Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude” and “At the Bay”. I strongly recommend getting ahead with the reading, especially of longer texts such as Women in Love.

"And the winner is...!": Canada's Literary Prize Culture

Term 2
MON & WED, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM 

“In short, prizes matter. . .With only an appearance on . . . [a] shortlist, a book moves from total obscurity in the classroom and pages of literary criticism to respectable showings in both—and it gets a healthy popularity boost along the way.”

- Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath & J.D. Porter

In this class, we will study the five fictional works short-listed for the 2025 Atwood-Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize: We, The Kindling by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand by Tim Bowling, Endling by Maria Reva, Simple Creatures by Robert McGill and Julius Julius by Aurora Stewart de Peña. We will begin by considering both ideological and institutional components of literary prizes (including evaluation criteria, selection of judges, and procedures for submission) as well as what Manshall, McGrath & Porter refer to as the “consecrating forces and actors” which influence literary awards. In addition to writing a critical essay on one of the texts, students will participate as a jury member in an in-house “Fiction 2025” award committee to choose their own winner from the 2025 Writers' Trust Fiction shortlist.

If you’re interested in recent fiction, the exigencies of literary prizes, evaluating contemporary texts, and current directions in Canadian literature, then this is the course for you!

Postcolonial Auto/Mobility 

Term 1 
TUE & THU, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 

Since the scholarship on automobility emerged in the field of sociology, its key claims have paid keen attention to the infrastructural networks in which the automobile is embedded. However, sociological examinations have in the same vein given short shrift to the postcolonial. This seminar takes this limitation of the sociological debate on automobility as a point of departure for reading postcolonial automobility in literary and cultural texts. In this course, we will commence from two central claims: the first, the entire world as we know it is postcolonial; and the second, the term “automobility” is a misnomer for what it purports to name. We will start by exploring automobility as a form that we can read across spaces—from Vancouver to New York to Jakarta to Lagos. In doing so, we will consider the term postcolonial and ask ourselves what it means to think of our world as we know it as postcolonial and of ourselves as postcolonial subjects. We shall apply our answers to these questions to rigorous discussions of instances of the automobile in postcolonial texts, with particular attention to Africa. Africa is particularly cogent for this reading because it challenges any simplistic understanding of automobility. Through novels, plays, poetry, and films, we will consider Africa’s automobile network of road, spatiality, coloniality, infrastructure, motor vehicle, and oil and the corollary effects of all this on the artistic imaginations of African cultural producers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In short, this course considers the keyword “automobility” as an entry point to unpacking the connections between literature and infrastructure.

Term 2 
WED & FRI, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM 

The material book: history and networks, 1780s-1890s 

This seminar places the material book in the context of its networks of raw materials, with a focus on linen, lead, trees, insects, leather, and bone and their entanglement with histories of emerging capitalism and financial exchange, maritime, riparian, and overland transport, chattel slavery and the traffic in enslaved people, "exploration," extraction, and settlement. Discussions will emphasize the English-language codex of Britain and America and the more expansively defined and/or non-codex books of Nuu-chah-nulth, Lakota, Haudenosaunee, and Cherokee nations/peoples. Assignments will be sequenced, including a theory or history presentation and handout, a research abstract, and an annotated bibliography, building toward the design and completion of individual projects investigating and contextualizing in historical and spatial relations the materials and making of a book (codex or otherwise) or related grouping of books of each student's choice. There will be opportunities for hands-on work with materials in Rare Books and Special Collections and the Museum of Anthropology. There will also be opportunities to gain practical experience in making the material book (binding, ink- and paper-making, letterpress) if seminar members desire.

Readings will include Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2020); Barnes and Goodman, American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (Univ of Pennsylvania Press, 2024); Skeehan, Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2020); Wisecup, Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale Univ Press, 2021) and "Toward a Bibliography of Birch Bark," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 117, no 4 (2023); Duffek, McLennan, and Wilson, Where the Power is: Indigenous Perspectives on Northwest Coast Art (Museum of Anthropology/Figure One, 2021); Marie Battiste, "Print Culture and Decolonizing the University," in Decolonizing the Page (Univ of Toronto Press, 2004); shorter works on specific materials and networks. Historical texts will include James Cook, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London, 1784); Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life (1789); Anna Barbauld, Evenings at Home (1792-96); William Wordsworth, The 1805 Prelude (selected books); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814); Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897); Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987); Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991); others TBA.

 

 

Radio Free Stein

Radio Free Stein

Adam Frank

Illinois: Northwestern University Press
2024

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein’s plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein’s theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts’ unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein’s early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

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About the Author

Adam Frank

Adam Frank is a professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures. His books include Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol and, coauthored with Elizabeth Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. He is the creator and producer of the Radio Free Stein critical sound project, available at radiofreestein.com

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Proximities: Literature, Mobility and the Politics of Displacement

John Culbert
Liverpool: U of Liverpool Press
2025

As the era of high globalization has given way to a time of resurgent nationalisms, the discourse of travel has undergone significant change. The previous era’s keywords of freedom, mobility and connection increasingly vie with a language of borders, security and national identity. In this study of the politics of modern travel and migration, John Culbert shows how today’s contradictions of global mobility are an abiding feature of modernity and an outgrowth of coloniality as an ongoing practice of land theft, displacement and dispossession.

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About the Author

John Culbert

John Culbert teaches in the UBC Department of English Language & Literatures and is a member of the UBC Centre for Migration Studies.