Radio Free Stein

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.

 

2025 Summer Undergraduate Courses

A. Medieval and Renaissance literatures: ENGL 343 to ENGL 350

B. 18th- and 19th-century literatures: ENGL 351 to ENGL 364

C. Modern, contemporary, transnational, and Indigenous literatures: ENGL 365 to ENGL 379

D. Media, theory, genre, and special topic:  ENGL 332 to ENGL 339; ENGL 380 to ENGL 397

A. Structure of English: ENGL 330, 331, 321

B. History of English: ENGL 318, 319, 342, 343, 344, 346

C. Approaches to contemporary English: ENGL 323, 324, 328

D. Discourse and meaning: ENGL 312, 322, 327

E. Rhetoric: ENGL 307-311

Note: topics covered in any of the above groups may also focus on ENGL 326 (which has no permanent title) and ENGL 489 (majors seminar-language, where the instructor decides on the topic offered in any given year).

Each course will be classed into one of the groups A-E in any given year, depending on the topic covered. Please see an advisor if you want ENGL 326 or ENGL 489 to count as satisfying group A-E requirements.

As of June 15, 2025

TERM 1
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Irony and Serious Humour in Multicultural Writing and Film

As cultural and literary devices, irony and humour are similar in that they often involve language or forms of expression that appear to mean something other than what they say. This surprising lack of commitment to meaning is part of what makes irony and humour funny—and thus unserious by definition. It’s only a joke, after all. Yet ironic double meaning and comic incongruity are also highly effective when it comes to raising difficult issues or potentially distressing and embarrassing subject matter. Ironically, it is the unseriousness of humour that seems most to recommend it as a literary and cultural technique for addressing serious issues.

This course proposes to take a serious look at how different forms of irony and humour operate in the creative work of a number of (mostly) contemporary Indigenous, Black, and multicultural authors. It inquires into how these authors use ironic and comic modes of address and representation to elude and transgress dominant social norms around class, gender, race, sexuality, and identity. Who or what is the “butt” or object of humour in the work of these short story writers, poets, and film makers? Are their jokes and ironic characterizations primarily instances of “laughing at,” or do they also invite readers to consolidate group identity and fellow feeling by means of “laughing with?” Do the texts use comic ambiguity and irony to “bribe” readers with feelings of comic enjoyment, or is the goal rather to generate ridicule, scorn, and displeasure. Most importantly, are there instances in which these authors use humour to perform more overtly serious work, such as political resistance, opposition, and critique?

The course syllabus is to comprise work by some or all of the following authors, poets, and directors: Sherman Alexie (Spokane), Marie Annharte Baker (Anishinaabe), Wanda Coleman, Linh Dinh, Chester Himes, Thomas King (Cherokee), Ha Jin, Spike Lee, Adrian Louis (Lovelock Paiute), K. Silem Mohammad, Trevor Noah, and John Yau. Many of the texts are quite short, and we are watching at least one film (in lieu of reading a novel).

 

TERM 1
TTh, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

We will post the course description as it becomes available.

TERM 2
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Narrating Realities

What does it mean to “represent” a real-world fact, experience, or belief in fiction? What happens to that “real” thing once it becomes part of a story? Why do we use stories — instead of more clearly factual modes of communication — to process and communicate our perceptions and experiences of reality? What are the signals we use to differentiate fact from fiction in the first place? If we accept that the lines between story and reality are blurry, how can fiction be used to propose alternative realities, or challenge the “truths” and perceptions of this one?

This course will analyze themes of fictional reality in texts from authors including Jorge Luis Borges, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, and Tim O’Brien. We will particularly focus on texts by racially marginalized authors in North America, including Eden Robinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, who have used fiction as a space in which to challenge the realities asserted by colonizer knowledge and stories. We will encounter texts in various formal genres — a novel, short fiction, poetry, a film — and ask how approaches to narrating reality mark the differences between these genres.

Texts will include Robinson's Monkey Beach (Vintage, 2000), O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), the Wachowskis’ first Matrix film (1999), and various poems and short stories.

TERM 2
TTh, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

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

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 Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There may be a couple of additional texts.

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 1
MW 10:00AM - 1:00PM

Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and Us.

AI is one of the most pressing technological and social questions of the current moment. Governments and corporations around the world are rushing to pour billions of dollars into AI research, all seeking to be the first to develop AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and to leverage other modes of AI (LLMs and the like). The social questions surrounding AI are numerous and pressing, yet they are not new. Writers have been exploring the potential impacts of AI on human society, and on human psychology, for many decades.

In this course we will explore the complex intimate relationships between humans and artificial intelligences through a range of literary texts from the 20th and 21st centuries. We will delve (a common LLM word) into a selection of seminal works that span various genres and perspectives, providing insights into the implications of our technological advancements on society, ethics, and identity.

The course texts will include the following: I, RobotNeuromancerThe Lifecycle of Software ObjectsThe Murderbot Diaries, vol 1 (the two novellas All Systems Red and Artificial Condition); and Klara and the Sun; and a selection of films on AI.

ONLINE

This online 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.

More details are available on the course website on canvas.ubc.ca.

ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

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

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.

TERM 1
TTh, 2:00PM - 5:00PM

Ghosts are Real (So are Vampires): Victorian Gothic Terror, Horror, and the Supernatural

“Ghosts are real, this much I know” – Edith Cushing, Crimson Peak

“There are such beings as vampires; some of us have evidence that they exist” – Abraham Van Helsing, Dracula

Whether we take Edith Cushing or Abraham Van Helsing at their word, the 19th-century Gothic revival certainly emphasized possibilities for terror and horror in tales of the supernatural. However, these interventions of spectral and un-dead beings often take place in the recognizable present; they speak to its anxieties. Perhaps they speak to ours as well, given our recent fascination with Neo-Victorian representations of the 19th century, such as Crimson Peak, as well as Penny Dreadful, From Hell, Sarah Waters’s Victorian trilogy, the numerous adaptations of Dracula (such as the recent third Nosferatu), plus many others.

We will examine fiction addressing issues of gender and sexuality; class, race, and culture; realism and the supernatural; urban and rural settings, all in a century known for developments in science and technology (especially photography), social upheaval, and a veneer of respectability, yet with monsters lurking in closets and under beds. Our focus will also permit consideration of the boom in publication of popular literature in a variety of formats, as well as the rise of the professional writer during the 19th century.

Core texts include Margaret Oliphant’s The Library Window, Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and selected short fiction possibly including M.R. James, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”; Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Old Nurse’s Story”; Sheridan LeFanu, “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street”; Mary Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne,” R.L. Stevenson, “The Body Snatcher”; E. Nesbit, “John Charrington’s Wedding” and maybe a couple of Victorian werewolf stories (since werewolf stories feature prominently in the research done for both Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s infamous Dracula). Evaluation will be based on a midterm essay, a term paper, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion both in class and on the course’s Canvas site.

 

ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

“Down the Rabbit Hole”: Child, Nation and British Fantasy Literature 

Children’s books—encountered in the earliest stages of children’s development—can have a lasting influence on children’s views of their world and themselves. English 392 investigates how narratives of national identity in the folklore and myth-narratives are deployed in fantasy texts written for children in England. Some of our texts will come from Canadian Indigenous traditions to provide a comparison with classic texts from England. Texts will include fairy tales, The Hobbit, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, “Coyote Columbus”, and The Graveyard Book. These will be examined through a broad range of critical perspectives which are literary, socio-political and historical. The pictures of nation constructed in children’s books represent particular national myths and culturally-informed identities. We will look at the ways both “classic” and less traditionally canonical children’s texts create intertextual narratives that expand, resist, subvert and adapt each other’s work. This fully asynchronous 13-week course runs from May to August, with writing assignments and weekly discussion posts. The final examination, set in August, is the only synchronous component, and will be invigilated through Zoom. This course is part of the English Minor program in the Department of English Language and Literatures, but is open to English majors and to students in other programs.

We will post the course description as it becomes available.

TERM 2
TTh, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

“And the winner is . . .!”: Canada’s Literary Prize Culture

“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 and  J.D. Porter

In this class, we will discuss five fictional works which won Canadian literary prizes in 2024: Anne Michael’s Held (Giller Prize), Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces (Governor General’s Award for Fiction), Sheung-King’s Batshit Seven (Atwood-Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize), Catherine Leroux’s The Future (Canada Reads) and Darrel J. McLeod’s A Season in Chezgh’un (Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize). We will consider the institutional components of these prizes (evaluation criteria, selection of judges, procedures for submission and selection, history, past recipients) as well as what Manshel, 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 2024” award committee to choose our own winner.

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

CROSS-LISTED WITH ENGL 491A-921
TERM 1
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Reading Indigenous Texts

How do we read Indigenous texts? How can reading help us think about what it means to be Indigenous – here, there, anywhere? What are the connections between writing, museums and universities? How can we think about the global, and about specificity, by engaging with Indigenous texts? Why read Indigenous texts in this present moment?

In this course, we will ask these questions by turning to recent collections of poetry by two very different Indigenous writers, Jenny Davis (Chickasaw) and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Marshallese), as well as short creative and critical texts by other writers; we will also ask them by connecting with some Indigenous ‘texts’ at the Museum of Anthropology on campus.

Students will have the opportunity to read texts of your choosing that connect our class discussions and readings with your own communities and networks. Evaluation will include short and long writing and research tasks, a reading log, and a short presentation.

CROSS-LISTED WITH ENGL 490-921
TERM 1
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Reading Indigenous Texts

How do we read Indigenous texts? How can reading help us think about what it means to be Indigenous – here, there, anywhere? What are the connections between writing, museums and universities? How can we think about the global, and about specificity, by engaging with Indigenous texts? Why read Indigenous texts in this present moment?

In this course, we will ask these questions by turning to recent collections of poetry by two very different Indigenous writers, Jenny Davis (Chickasaw) and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Marshallese), as well as short creative and critical texts by other writers; we will also ask them by connecting with some Indigenous ‘texts’ at the Museum of Anthropology on campus.

Students will have the opportunity to read texts of your choosing that connect our class discussions and readings with your own communities and networks. Evaluation will include short and long writing and research tasks, a reading log, and a short presentation.

 

2025 Summer + Winter

 

2025 Summer

Term 1
MON WED, 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Decadence and the Origins of Camp: A Queer Genealogy

“[Camp] is terribly hard to define but you’ll find yourself wanting to use the word whenever you discuss aesthetics or philosophy or almost anything.” – Christopher Isherwood

This seminar examines the origins (and trajectories) of the much-debated aesthetic sensibility known as camp. Widely understood as a celebration of artifice and stylized exaggeration, camp still struggles to be taken seriously because of its orientation toward humor and the un-serious. Although one of its earliest theorists, Susan Sontag, famously argued that camp was at its core “apolitical,” one of the questions students in this seminar will ponder is the potential political value (to queer and non-queer people alike) of camp style, performance, and gender critique. We will attempt to situate camp historically by locating its origins in the aesthetic strategies of 1890s Decadence before exploring its manifestations, transformations, and characteristic patterns across the twentieth century and beyond. In pursuit of this objective we will read literary and theoretical texts in addition to viewing several films. Our aim will not be to construct a camp canon, but instead to observe how camp and Decadence speak to queer experience at distinct historical moments while at the same time retaining recognizably transhistorical characteristics.

Readings will include (theory/criticism): Walter Pater, Susan Sontag, Fabio Cleto, Esther Newton, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David Halperin, Paul Baker, and others; (literature) Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, Noël Coward, Christopher Isherwood, Frank O’Hara, Joe Orton, and others. We will also view films by directors Robert Aldritch, John Waters, and Pedro Almodóvar.

Term 2
TUE THU, 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Storying Land: Canadian Literary Ecologies

Since emerging as a multidisciplinary field in the early twenty-first century, environmental humanities research has variously interrogated the narratives and cultural concepts figuring humanity’s relations to the land and non-human nature. Imperative to literary criticism within this paradigm has been not only a reappraisal of “nature” as an object of study but a reorientation of anthropocentric understandings of humanistic “culture” (including the Humanities) toward its material and ecological embeddedness—pressingly, the inseparability of environmental crises from their historical and cultural foundations shaping how we imagine (and might reimagine) what it means to live in relation to the land. In the context of lands claimed by the state formation of Canada—the land beneath our feet at UBC—such crises and relations are marked by the history of colonization and encompass radical differences between settler and Indigenous epistemologies. Literature in Canada is implicated in the historical stabilization of foundational binaries between “human” and “nature” that have naturalized the eliminatory and extractive logics of settler-colonial territoriality, a violent structure of both land-based domination and environmental injustice. A grounding place for struggles towards decolonial and/as environmental justice in the work of many writers, artists, scholars, thinkers, and activists in Canada today is thus the meaning of the land. How do we know the land in literature? Can literature write the land (without exploiting it)? How might the land itself speak through literature? How is it heard?

In this seminar we will take up these (and other) questions by examining literature’s relationship with land in the context of Canada. Our concern will be to first establish a historical perspective, and then to ask what role stories, literary arts, and humanities research are playing in denaturalizing settler-capitalism by envisioning reciprocal land relations and more environmentally just futures. We will examine the Eurodescendant epistemologies transposed by writers who mapped onto ostensibly “new” territory ideas about the sublime beauty or terror of a vast, unpopulated landscape—ideas like “wilderness” and “the North” that supported Canadian national identity, Indigenous erasure, and the work of “developing” lands and resources. We will consider how such land-claiming narratives delegitimated other ways of living and making meaning in relation to the land, displacing not only the storied knowledge of Indigenous peoples who have lived with the land for millennia, but other diasporic relations to place and ecology. We will look to decolonial epistemologies of land and kinship in contemporary Indigenous literary arts and activism to consider resurgence in relation to environmental justice (and in conflict with certain currents of “environmentalism”), and to cultural ecologies of non-Indigenous solidarity and anti-anthropocentric resistance. Our readings will broach both rural and urban lands in Canada, range from the Pacific coast to the Prairies to the high Arctic to the Maritimes, and address particular crises and sites of resource extraction (e.g., pipelines, tarsands, water, climate change), adopting an expansive sense of the “literary” in diverse genres and representational forms.

Readings:

We’ll be localizing our approach to environmental humanism within Canadian contexts, drawing on Indigenous studies and settler-colonial studies as they interface with thinking in ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies, petrocultures/energy humanities, critical race studies, and environmental and climate justice.

Students can expect a mixture of creative and critical texts; while not a “theory” seminar exclusively, it encompasses theory and encourages students to consider stories and creative arts as theoretical. Generally, our seminars will combine secondary readings with a primary text(s) in the form of novels, books of poetry, short stories, short and feature-length films, digital media, and visual art. A provisional list of authors/artists includes Jeannette Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Di Brandt, Edward Burtynsky, Warren Cariou, Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Glen Coulthard, Cherie Dimaline, Margery Fee, Northrop Frye, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, the Group of Seven, Donna Haraway, Tasha Hubbard, Naomi Klein, Bruno Latour, Lee Maracle, Cecily Nicholson, Rob Nixon, Howard O’Hagan, Al Purdy, Eden Robinson, Zoe Todd, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Imre Szeman, Tanya Tagaq, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Kyle Powys Whyte, Patrick Wolfe, rita wong, Kathryn Yusoff, Zacharias Kunuk.

Assignments:

The course will likely involve 2 short reading response/reflection papers, one individual seminar presentation, one creative/critical project, and a final conference-style paper

2025 Winter

NOTE: Schedule subject to change
As of April 15, 2025

Term 1
THU, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

This course will introduce new MA students to graduate-level research skills and professional practices. Meetings will include workshops, guest presentations, and library visits. Sessions will focus on topics such as research areas, thesis supervision, archival research, digital tools, applying for grants, and attending conferences. There are no formal assignments and the course is marked Pass/Fail

Term 1
THU, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Required of all graduate students in the PhD program. Pass/Fail.

Term 2
MON, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Black Studies Now

What is Black studies? Although Black studies became institutionalized as an academic discipline in U.S. universities in the 1960s, it has existed since the 18th century as a set of intellectual traditions and liberation struggles. These traditions and struggles have borne witness to the production and maintenance of anti-Blackness, a mode of hierarchical distinction between humans. Black studies, therefore, is simultaneously a critique of Western modernity and as well as sizeable archive of social, political, and cultural alternatives.

This course surveys recent monographs in Black Studies to think about what is possible and to consider the work that still needs to be done in this field of inquiry. Students will be introduced to the history, theory and philosophy of Black studies, as well as the methodological formations and critical debates occurring within the field in the contemporary moment. Key principal concepts and methods in Black studies will be addressed over the course of the semester. While this is primarily a theory course, students can also expect to engage with myriad other forms of media, including film, poetry, music, and novels.

Term 2
TUE, 2:30PM - 5:30 PM

Studies in Poetry

In the last 75 years or so, much discourse in poetics has been concerned with the idea of the paraphrase—that is, with the prose version of the poem that is used to make the poem clearer. While paraphrases of this sort can be useful in teaching, there has been an unfortunate tendency among critics to discuss the paraphrase rather than the poem, to see a poem as merely a text like any other. The dominance of historicist approaches to literature in the last few decades has exacerbated this tendency. The result has been a tendency to discuss poetry as if it were not importantly different from prose. In this course, we’ll resist this tendency. After discussing a number of theoretical texts, we’ll consider lyric poems that insist on their status as poetry. We’ll look at a selection of poems from about 1600 to about 2020. These poems will fall into one of three groups: poems that deal with the relation between speech and writing, poems that focus on description, and poems that focus on form. Students will write a series of short analyses and one long essay.

 

Term 1
TUE, 12:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Shadowing the Canon: Late-Medieval and Early Modern Romance

Medieval romance is comprised of a fantastical body of texts that were popular in many senses of the word; widely read and copied, transmitted over many miles and languages across Europe, deeply influential in both literary and material medieval culture, and popular as the reading matter of the burgeoning urban mercantile classes of late-medieval England. Narratives of adventuring knights, scheming villains, ineffable faerie, and malevolent devils, these texts produce an enchanted and wonder-filled world for their audiences. As a genre it contains narratives of the once-chivalric romances of the aristocratic classes, now repurposed as reading entertainments for the gentry and rising mercantile classes, simultaneously acting as aspirational literature and class critique.

This course is a graduate-level introduction to the scholarly field of medieval romance studies. It will introduce students to this lively and surprising genre, the range of historical and contemporary theoretical approaches to the material, and to the survival and reinvigoration of the genre in the Early Modern period.

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

Crip of Color Critique: A Seminar on Disability, Race, and Empire

A seminar on the emerging field of crip-of-color critique, which brings together concepts and methodologies from critical disability studies, critical race theory, and post-colonial theory.

Term 2
THU, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM
CROSS-LISTED WITH STS 501

Proseminar in Science and Technology Studies

This course surveys foundational and important texts in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Beginning with Thomas A. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the reading list will focus on STS scholars who have helped define the field over the decades (e.g. Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour), in addition to more recent influential contributions from the likes of Kim Tallbear and Shobita Parthasarathy. Taking Kuhn’s exhortation to pay more attention to rhetoric seriously, this class will often (but not always!) emphasize texts that examine the intertwining of science, technology, and medicine from the perspectives of rhetoric, discourse, media, and language.

Term 1
FRI, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Senses

The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.

--Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

 

The senses are not immutable; they have social, political, and cultural histories. In the nineteenth-century, new understandings of the senses emerged. The senses were hierarchized and employed in arguments about gender, race, class, and empire. Developments in science and physiological psychology gave rise to laboratory studies of the senses. New technologies permitted the “extension” of the senses in telephones, x-rays machines, and powerful telescopes and microscopes. Sensorial disabilities were reconceived. Literary texts shared the culture’s fascination with the senses: “Sensation” fiction sought to produce sense experiences in readers; realism relied on vivid sensory description; early science fiction imagined alternative perceptual organizations.

This seminar asks how the senses were categorized, conceptualized, and represented in nineteenth-century literature. Topics discussed will include depictions of deafness and blindness in fiction; imperialism and the senses; odor, race, and class; gender and dominant senses; the aesthetic movement and sensory experience; the sensory onslaught of the industrial city; the extrasensory world of the Victorian séance, and new sensory technologies.

Texts will include:

  • Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch
  • Charles Dickens, “Dr. Marigold”; and from American Notes
  • Rudyard Kipling, “They”
  • Sheridan Le Fanu, “Green Tea”
  • Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
  • Florence McLandburgh, “The Automaton Ear”
  • Edith Nesbit, “The Five Senses”
  • Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
  • Rabindranath Tagore, “Vision”
  • H.G. Wells, “The Country of the Blind”; “Davidson’s Eyes”; “Intelligence on Mars”

 

from

Constance Classen, “Synaesthesia Unraveled: The Union of the Senses from a Cultural Perspective”

Jennifer Esmail, Reading Victorian Deafness

Hsuan L. Hsu, The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Andrew Rotter, “Empires of the Senses: How Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Shaped Imperial Encounters”

M. Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses

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

Modernist Fiction, Imperial Decline, and Decolonization

The literary historical period we call “modernism” (c. 1880-1945) sees the height of the British empire in its territorial span while also bearing witness to its decline in the face of anti-colonial and national independence movements. How was empire and its loss represented by modernist authors? How did their aesthetic strategies mediate racial and colonial difference? And how did authors from the colonies simultaneously take up and challenge modernist forms in their efforts at anti-colonial resistance and decolonization? What kinds of modernist literary and sociological institutions facilitated the emergence of postcolonial authors in the postwar period? This course will introduce students to key modernist novels; trace the evolution of modernism through its subperiods of high modernism, late modernism, and postcolonial modernity; and think through the political affordances of modernist aesthetic practices. We will focus primarily on the history of Britain and its colonies, though we may also turn to the Harlem Renaissance to consider modernism in a transatlantic frame. Given the focus on fiction, the course will be reading-intensive and students should be prepared to cover a novel (some longer, some shorter) each week. Texts we are likely to study include: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India; James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September; George Orwell’s Burmese Days; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable; Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea; Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners; George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin; and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing.

Term 2
FRI, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

Folk Horror

In the early nineteenth-century, intellectuals in the United States, Britain, and Europe became fascinated with the culture of what was called the “folk.” Indicating population pockets that allegedly had not yet entered modernity (and in some cases, it was believed, never would enter modernity), the “folk” were a vital source of myth and fictional narrative for Western romanticism, providing modern nations and peoples with deep time histories and legendary authorizations for current power. In this course we will read and watch works from within a subset of folk narrative called folk horror. Unlike conventional gothic horror stories, which often focus on the malevolence of bygone aristocratic, monarchical, and religious formations, folk horror posits the haunting of modernity by a primitive past, whether an unfamiliar group of people/creatures or set of ancient stories that modernity has forgotten or failed to overcome.  Folk horror has also, importantly, been utilized to relay the experiences and histories of marginalized groups. In this course, we will study several folk horror tales and films with a view to understanding their relationship to the development of modern nationalisms and to racialized and evolutionary historiography. In addition to studying works of fiction, we will also read theoretical works linked to the gothic and to critical race, decolonial, and feminist theory. We will read Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, and Cherie Dimaline. We will also watch the following films: The Wicker Man, The Witch, Us, and Midsomer. We will read Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Étienne Balibar, Slavoj Žižek, Susan Stewart, Tzvetan Todorov, Hortense Spillers, Alexander G. Weheliye, and Christina Sharpe.

Term 1
THU, 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Multimodal Communication: Text and Image

Communicative genres combining language with visual forms have become extremely common, if not outright inescapable. We encounter examples of such multimodal artifacts in our daily interaction with the internet and social media, with news and advertisements, as well as in comics and graphic novels. All these media genres develop their own patterns of interaction between image and text, while also prompting remarkable changes in the use of standard linguistic forms. Also, multimodal genres have now started ‘infecting’ each other linguistically.

This course will introduce students to analytical and theoretical tools we can use to better understand the meaning and form of multimodal artifacts. It will provide opportunities to study the linguistic and usage-related effects of the new genres in various contexts.

Term 2
WED, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

"In Search of Our Better Selves:" Settler Colonialism and Narratives of Settler Replacement

This graduate-level course will engage with critical questions surrounding the dynamics of settler colonialism, particularly the ways in which settler narratives of replacement and erasure intersect with Indigenous identities, histories, and struggles for self-determination. We will explore the frameworks of settler colonialism in the current contexts of Canada and the U.S., examining how these political systems have consistently sought to dispossess Indigenous peoples, not only geographically but also culturally and temporally. Through the lens of Indigenous cultural and political knowledge production, we will investigate how settler colonialism’s narratives of replacement shape the understandings of belonging, time, and community in settler states, and how these processes have been resisted, disrupted, and reimagined by Indigenous peoples and communities.

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

Keywords in Asian Diaspora Studies

The West Coast of what is now Canada has long been shaped by its intricate connections to the Pacific World. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, Asian migrants were subjected to systematic forms of exclusion and racial violence. Although these measures were largely abolished in the mid-twentieth century, their legacies continue to be lived and felt to this day. What does it mean to do Asian diaspora studies from here - from the unceded Indigenous territories on which we are located? What critical questions emerge from local histories of migration and racialization?

This seminar takes up these questions by exploring a series of "keywords" in Asian diaspora studies. We will draw from fields such as postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, Asian Canadian critique, and inter-Asia critique in order to develop strategies for critically thinking and writing about transnational cultures. We will also engage with contemporary Asian Canadian cultural production by working with local institutions such as archives, museums, and galleries. Some classes may be held off campus - please contact the instructor in the summer if you have any questions about scheduling.

Theoretical readings may include selections from:

  • Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe
  • Chen Kuan-hsing, Asia as Method
  • Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks
  • Iyko Day, Alien Capital
  • Lisa Lowe, The Intimacy of Four Continents
  • Patrick Wolfe, Trace of History: Elementary Structures of Race
  • Takeuchi Yoshimi, What is Modernity?

Term 1
WED, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

Introduction to Anti/Post/Decolonial Studies and Theory

“…the power of deceit does not weaken upon exposure…”  -- Taussig

 

Designed as an introduction to anti/post/decolonial studies, issues and theories, this course will feature selections from major works in the field focalized through the topics of gender/sexuality, solidarity, colonial erasures and anti/post/decolonial power. We will read selections of major texts as listed below to organize conversations between the different authors. Assuming no prior knowledge of the field or theory, the course should provide you with concepts and engagements portable to your own area/subfields. Texts we will read in their entirety: History of Sexuality, Vol.1, Culture and Imperialism and The Wretched of the Earth. Short novels will be read in tandem with the discursive works and may include: Rabih Alameddine’s Wrong End of the Telescope, Roberto Bolano’s Amulet, Ibtisam Azem’s Disappearance, and Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story.

Selected chapters from:

  • Judith Butler,   The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind
  • Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
  • ---A Dying Colonialism
  • Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol.1
  • ---Security, Territory, Population
  • Karima Lazali, Colonial Trauma
  • Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony and Critique of Black Reason
  • Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran
  • Hortense Spillers, “Interstices” and “All the Things You Could Be By Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race”
  • Gayatri Spivak, Other Asias
  • ---Critique of Postcolonial Reason
  • Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism and Nervous System
  • Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
  • ---After the Last Sky (w/ Yeats)
  • Francoise Verges, Monsters and Revolutionaries
  • Zahi Zalloua, Fanon, Zizek and the Violence of Resistance
  • Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness and the Promise of Universality

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

Postcolonial Auto/Mobility

This seminar explores the interplay between postcolonial automobility and African literatures and cultures. We will take as our starting point of investigation the emergence of the motor vehicle in Africa, around the beginning of the twentieth century, and the cogent questions that arise from (post)colonial Africa’s encounter with vehicular technology. 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 range of ideas that have shaped African literary production since the twentieth century. Primary readings will include works from authors and artists such as Peter Abrahams, Wole Soyinka, Nawal El-Saadawi, Ousmane Sembene, Ama Ata Aidoo, Karen King-Aribisala, Ben Okri, and Imbolo Mbue. We will ground our examinations in criticism from scholars such as Marti Kheel, Harry Garuba, AbdouMaliq Simone, Kenda Mutongi, Cajetan Iheka, and others.

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

This seminar explores the variety of meanings associated with the terms performative and performativity. These terms and concepts initially belong to two very different discourses, speech act theory and theater studies, but have found their way into general use in the theoretical humanities. Our concerns are, in part, genealogical: we will track the emergence of these concepts in ordinary language philosophy (J.L. Austin. How to Do Things with Words), their uptakes in Continental philosophy, and their inflections and uses in feminist and queer theory. We will also be concerned with auxiliary terms and concepts that have followed from the performative (such as the distinction between illocutionary, locutionary, and perlocutionary aspects of speech acts and the idea of the para-performative). The course goal is to unpack the meanings these terms have come to have in the last two or three decades, their particular coherence and incoherence, their uses and intended consequences (for example, in the contrast between performativity and representation), and the values associated with these terms. Alongside explicitly theoretical readings we will encounter a handful of twentieth-century plays or scripts that themselves offer accounts of performativity in either a linguistic or theatrical sense, and the possible relations between these senses.

Readings to include work by J.L. Austin, Samuel Beckett, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Nathalie Sarraute, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gertrude Stein, and others.

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

Modernism and the Psychoanalysis of Fascism, 1894-1945

            The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have
suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves
. --- George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler and the World State" (1941)

            It seems to me a monstrosity; by that I mean something that is altogether beyond the
bounds of common sense, truth and justice, a blind and stupid thing that would drag us
back centuries in time, ultimately a thing that would lead to religious persecution, which
            is the worst of abominations and would bathe every country in blood. --- Émile Zola, "A Plea for the Jews" (1896)

            There were other swastikas. They were the chalk ones now; I followed them down
Bergasse as if they had been chalked on the pavement especially for my benefit. They led
to the Professor's door
--- H. D., Tribute to Freud [1933]

This seminar explores the critical and analytical writings of those whose experience of European fascism was visceral and immediate. We will proceed for the most part chronologically to perceive the unfolding of history as these key witnesses experienced it. We will assess this living history of the period both for its penetrating insights into the reality of things and for its dialectically potent forms of misrecognition. Invariably "alive to reverberations of the future" (André Breton qtd. by Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"), these authors could not always know how the story would end.

Activities and assignments will include a seminar presentation and a close reading of a selected passage. Students will also write one three-page essay, to be distributed and read aloud, and one final research paper.

We will seek the definition of the key words of the seminar--modernism, psychoanalysis, fascism--as it flows up from our reading. Since we can read only a practical selection of the following reading list in our allotted twelve weeks (the final reading schedule will be available this summer), students will be invited in their independent research projects to explore some of the readings not covered in our weekly meetings.

Reading List (in progress):

  • Émile Zola, "A Plea for the Jews" (1896)
  • Émile Zola, "J'accuse!" (1898)
  • F.T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909)
  • F.T. Marinetti, "Let's Murder the Moonshine" (1909)
  • Franz Kafka, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia" (1909)
  • W.E. B. Du Bois, "World War and the Color Line" (1914)
  • Richard Harding Davis, With the Allies (1914)
  • Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915)
  • Edith Wharton, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1915)
  • Ellen La Motte, The Backwash of War (1916)
  • Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (1929) [1914-18]
  • Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925) [1914-15]
  • Henri Barbusse, Under Fire (1916)
  • Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918)
  • Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (1920)
  • Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)
  • Ernest Hemingway, "Mussolini: Biggest Bluff in Europe" (1923)
  • Ernest Hemingway, "Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
  • Henri Barbusse, Thus and Thus (1927)
  • Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
  • Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews (1926-7)
  • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) [1929]
  • Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intellectual" (1929)
  • Walter Benjamin, "Theories of German Fascism" (1930)
  • William Faulkner, "Dry September" (1932)
  • H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Tribute to Freud (1956) [1933-44]
  • Victor Klemperer, Victor, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 (Volume 1, 1998)
  • Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935)
  • William Faulkner, Pylon (1935)
  • Ernest Hemingway, "Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter" (1935)
  • Ernest Hemingway, "Wings Always Over Africa: An Ornithological Letter" (1936)
  • Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair (1947) [1930s and 40s]
  • Kenneth Burke, "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle'" (1939)
  • George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler and the World State" (1941)
  • Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy (1942)
  • George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946)
  • Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951) [1944]
  • Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism" (1975)
  • Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992)
  • Timothy Snyder, "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?" (2011)
  • Christopher R. Browning, "Hitler's Enablers." New York Review of Books LXXI, November 7, 2024, pp. 52-54.

Suggested General and Preliminary Reading:

  •  Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
  • Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (1995)
  • Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011)
  • Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010).
  • Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (2015)
  • Maurice Samuels, Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Centre of the Affair (2024)

Term 1
TUE, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Race, Artificiality, Information 

This graduate seminar examines the discursive and material intersections of artifice and information—most commonly expressed in popular imaginaries as "artificial intelligence" or machine learning—as inquiries into the digital age's racial logics and racial mattering. Bringing together critical ethnic studies, critical race theory, new media studies, studies of visual culture, and feminist science and technology studies, this seminar offers interdisciplinary approaches for studying the way computation's materiality reiterates and emerges from imperialist and colonial legacies. But it also engages critical frameworks and practices that navigate, and even reroute, such networks. Readings may include: Simone Browne's Dark Matters, Ramon Amaro's The Black Technical Object, Wendy Chun's Updating to Remain the Same, Leslie Bow's Racist Love, Anne Cheng's Ornamentalism, Marisa Elena Duarte's Network Sovereignty. 

 

 

 

2025 Winter

As of  June 19, 2025

Learn more about the Ways of Knowing degree requirement for students entering the BA degree program. For 2025W, the Department of English Language and Literatures offers ENGL 230 and ENGL 376 as courses that will meet the Place and Power breadth requirement.

What are the new Bachelor of Arts Degree Requirements?
Course Planning? See the Arts Ways of Knowing Breadth Requirement Explorer

A. Medieval and Renaissance literatures: ENGL 343 to ENGL 350

B. 18th- and 19th-century literatures: ENGL 351 to ENGL 364

C. Modern, contemporary, transnational, and Indigenous literatures: ENGL 365 to ENGL 379

D. Media, theory, genre, and special topic:  ENGL 332 to ENGL 339; ENGL 380 to ENGL 397

A. Structure of English: ENGL 330, 331, 321

B. History of English: ENGL 318, 319, 342, 343, 344, 346

C. Approaches to contemporary English: ENGL 323, 324, 328

D. Discourse and meaning: ENGL 312, 322, 327

E. Rhetoric: ENGL 307-311

Note: topics covered in any of the above groups may also focus on ENGL 326 (which has no permanent title) and ENGL 489 (majors seminar-language, where the instructor decides on the topic offered in any given year).

Each course will be classed into one of the groups A-E in any given year, depending on the topic covered. Please see an advisor if you want ENGL 326 or ENGL 489 to count as satisfying group A-E requirements.



100-level Courses

Term 1
MWF, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

English 100 provides a writing-intensive introduction to language and literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. It fulfills the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement and is recommended for students intending to take a Major or Honours in English.

Fragmented Identities and Multiple Selves

This section of English 100 will explore representations of ambiguous and multifaceted identities in a range of diverse texts: two novels (Frankenstein and Freshwater), three short stories ("The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Secret Sharer") and two of Sylvia Plath's poems ("Lady Lazarus" and "Mad Girl's Love Song"). In class lectures and discussions, we will consider the historical and cultural contexts in which these works were produced as well as a range of theoretical and critical approaches.

Course assignments will focus on developing university-level skills of critical analysis and response, academic writing and research. There will be no final examination in this course.

Term 1
MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Literature as a Transformative Space

English 100 provides a writing-intensive introduction to language and literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. In this section, we will be exploring works of  literature that engage with transformations of all kinds and with texts that transgress expectations. We will examine how authors transpose genders, transform between species, transport across time, and translate the environment through the study of three novels (Virgina Woolf’s Orlando, Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being) alongside the poetry of rita wong in forage and Kim Fu’s amazing short stories Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. Assessment will be based on a series of smaller assignments, scaffolded to the final research paper and a creative rewrite.

Term 1
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Awakenings

This course offers a writing-intensive introduction to literary studies and fulfils the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement. The course is open only to students in the Faculty of Arts and is recommended for students intending to enter the Majors or Honours program in English Language and Literatures. Students will write short essays in class; engage in discussion and intellectual exchange in the classroom; do informal close readings (aloud); and write one longer take-home essay. There will also be a final exam.

Please note: this course is resolutely unfriendly to AI tools and CHATGPT etc.

Reading List:

  • Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925)
  • Kate Chopin, "Desirée's Baby" (1893)
  • Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
  • Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (1841)
  • Emily Dickinson, poems (1855-1865)
  • Sophocles, Antigone (440 BC)
  • Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook" (1968)
  • Joan Didon, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" (1966)
  • Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1966)

Term 1
MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

In this writing-intensive introduction to language and literary studies, we will look at how literary artists themselves think about literature, something they often reveal when they respond to previous texts and traditions. We will read three clusters of texts that allow us to explore ideas of writing in, and writing back. Our first cluster is built around a medieval literary figure who has also been persistently fascinating to modern audiences, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. We will read selections from Chaucer (in translation), alongside two modern poetic responses (by Jamaican poet Jean “Binta” Breeze and British poet and spoken-word performer Patience Agbabi), as well as the recent play by British writer Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden. Our second cluster begins with the tradition of “carpe diem” poetry as reflected in some of its most iconic poems, by Christopher Marlowe, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Donne, and then considers how early modern poetry like this is refracted and repurposed in the Oji-Cree writer Joshua Whitehead’s 2017 poetry collection Full-Metal Indigiqueer. Finally, we will read William Shakespeare’s Macbeth alongside Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novel Wyrd Sisters (which also riffs on Hamlet, but there’s only so much we can read!). Scaffolded assignments throughout the term will offer you the tools to think through how and why literature works - when, where, and for whom.

Term 1

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Genres of Indigeneity

This course is a writing-intensive introduction to the discipline of Indigenous literary studies, specifically through an engagement with a text's (a book, a poem, a play, et cetera) critical and theoretical contexts. This course is recommended for students considering English as a major in particular. The focus of this course will be contemporary Indigenous literatures from the context of what is currently called Canada, with a emphasis placed on the notion of "genre" and its possibilities, limits, and/or constraints. What does the form of the novel enable? What can it prohibit, delimit, or foreclose? What political work is a poem doing (if any), especially in and for Indigenous communities? This course takes these questions seriously and asks what worlds Indigenous literatures can create?

Term 1

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Vampires on Page and Screen: Transfusions and Transmutations

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.” - Bram Stoker, Dracula

This course examines adaptations in something of the way vampire transformations work, by considering how elements of appearance remain but the resulting creature is always radically different. We’ll go in prepared, not with stakes and garlic but with the critical and theoretical tools needed to move beyond popular online discussions and enable consideration of various questions arising in creating through adaptation a separate text in a different genre. Our approach will be in literary and cultural studies rather than film studies, as we consider why stories about vampires, the blood-drinking immortals of myth and legend - and more recently of fiction and film - fascinate us and whether visualizing them using an existing narrative results in a transfusion, a transformation, or both.

Core texts tentatively include two novels, J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and three film adaptations: one of Carmilla and two of Dracula (to be determined by class vote), as well as Gardner and Diaz, Reading and Writing About Literature (6th edition). Through readings in current criticism and theory, we will develop strategies for textual analysis in literary and cultural studies. We will also consider the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reaching a “fixed” or consensus reading of any text.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a midterm essay and a term paper (both requiring secondary academic research), a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.

Keep checking my blog (https://blogs.ubc.ca/drgmbaxter/) for updates concerning texts and requirements.

 

Term 1

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

The Unruly Self in Literature and Culture

New York high society and its sometimes vicious marriage market at the turn of the twentieth century in Edith Wharton’s stories, a “Brotherhood” of 1940s communist activists in a city filled with racial tensions in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the absurd talk-show circuit of Don DeLillo’s drama Valparaiso, homophobic small-town America in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home . . . These are some of the settings and social orders the heroes and heroines of this course have to navigate. We will follow these characters as they sometimes rebel against and sometimes acquiesce to the orders and institutions in which they find themselves. Why isn’t the self easily tamed by society’s demands and norms? We conclude the course with Werner Herzog’s astonishing documentary film about a man among the bears, Grizzly Man. This course offers students an introduction to the skills and practices of literary criticism. Through a focus on writing assignments across the term, students will learn how to ask rich and provocative questions about literary texts, how to build interpretations around highly focused work with a text’s individual words and images, and how to use literature and film as a lens for understanding historical contexts and social problems. Through invigorating reading and viewing experiences, students will build an arsenal of strong interpretive and writing techniques for their university futures.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

The Quest for Self

 In this section of English 100, we will examine a taster of different genres of English literature, including Afrofuturism and speculative fiction, Indigenous life writing, fantasy and children’s literature, as well as classic works of Victorian sensational fiction, and comedy. The path to selfhood takes unexpected turns as protagonists encounter lessons from ghosts and monsters, confront or try to escape alternate or entirely imaginary versions of themselves, and generally avoid the familiar and the conventional. In addition to our core texts, we will read some short works and excerpts, as well as scholarly essays that provide contexts and theoretical frameworks to guide our own analysis of the texts. Students will be trained in introductory critical literary analysis, research and academic writing through writing short essays. This course encourages active learning through presentations, team work and flipped classroom exercises. Our core texts will include the following: The Deep (Rivers Solomon), The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman) and The Importance of Being Earnest (Oscar Wilde).

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Cinematic Interiors

This section of English 100 explores the evolving role of space in shaping storytelling across film and television. Focusing on the films of directors such as Hitchcock, Coppola, and Bong, as well as TV series like Severance and Succession, we’ll look at domestic interiors, workplaces, curated environments, communal settings, and transitional spaces to consider how cinematic spaces function as sites of mood, meaning, and narrative tension. We’ll explore how cultural and technological shifts are changing our relationships to space, presence, and perception. Themes include the collapse of shared narratives, the erosion of trust in once-stable spaces, and the fragmented self in surveillance culture. Drawing on film theory, design, and narrative analysis, students will gain tools to analyze visual and spatial storytelling.

Short, scaffolded writing assignments, informed by key readings from Steven Jacobs and others, will support the development of interpretive and analytical skills.
No prior film experience required - just curiosity and a willingness to look closely.

Term 2

MWF, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

This course reads fantasy and speculative fiction to explore the many ways in which writers imagine how societies and cultures might be... otherwise. Fantastic and speculative worlds are some of the richest forms of experimental thought, problem solving and storytelling in which we engage. How do writers make these worlds persuasive? What kinds of connections do they expect us to make between their storyworlds and the actual world? What influences differences among the ways they take up similar themes? We will discover multiple answers to these questions. Along the way, we will also learn general principles about narrative and fiction as they are theorized in English, and how writing works at an analytical level, by discussing matters such as plot, figuration, character, point of view, and setting. Writers include Le Guin, Bradbury, Orwell, Angela Carter, Vonnegut, Ishiguro, Karen Tei Yamashita.

Term 2

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

A writing-intensive introduction to the disciplines of literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. Fulfils the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement. Open only to students in the Faculty of Arts. Recommended for students intending to become English majors. Essays are required. This course is not eligible for Credit/D/Fail grading.

This course is an introduction to the art of reading and writing about literature. Our meetings will be devoted to reading about literature. These sessions will focus on Octavia Butler’s Kindred as well as two of its adaptations—the graphic novel and the FX TV series. We will deepen our understanding of these texts and their contexts by: engaging with scholarly articles that explore historical context and audience; reading in current criticism and theory; and developing strategies for textual analysis in literary and cultural studies. Over the term, students will be able to develop their own conclusions about literature and literary criticism, while developing their skills as academic writers.

Our meetings will also be spent tackling writing. To put it another way, ENGL 100 is a writing course that uses literature as its topic; because it meets the Faculty of Arts Writing Requirement, the focus must clearly be on scholarly writing throughout the course. You will write weekly responses, two short essays, and a term paper requiring secondary research.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Literature and (Re)creation

Literature is a powerful tool for recreation. Reading literature can be a pleasurable pastime that provides respite from the stresses of living in this world, even as authors use literature to help recreate this world, help us see this world differently, and help us imagine other worlds. This course will examine how a variety of stories, plays, and poems engage in and with (re)creation: how they depict recreation, people (re)creating themselves, and people (re)creating the world. Our texts will likely include William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, excerpts from Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Quiara Alegria Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful, and Octavia E. Butler’s Blood Child and Other Stories

Term 2

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Villains and Villainy

One of the most enduring figures in literature is the villain or antagonist. In this section, we will want to ask why this might be by focusing on a variety of literary villains in fiction, poetry, and drama. Villains force us to confront a number of question, and ethical ones in particular: what makes villains so attractive to both writers and readers? Are villains sometimes justified? And ultimately, what might their ambition, criminality and charisma tell us about ourselves?

Mark Breakdown:

  • Participation: 10%
  • In-class essay #1: 15%
  • In-class essay #2: 20%
  • Term paper: 25%
  • Final Exam: 30%

Reading List:

  • Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado” (online)
  • William Shakespeare, Othello
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  • Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Final Problem” from The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
  • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  • Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

 

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Dancing in Chains: Writing and Reading Translation

If creation is a dance, translation is a dance in chains. –Bijan Elahi (trans. from Persian by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian)

Obviously, all translators need not be nonbinary…--Suneela Mubayi

What is the mysterious work of literary translation, and how does this unsung practice shape how we read and hear texts ancient and modern? How should we read translated texts? Who are translators—and should a translator’s gender, race, or politics affect our readings? Is translation queer, trans, nonbinary? Can the act of translation be imperialist or otherwise unethical? Could you, yourself, translate literature into or out of English, or from one medium to another? This first-year writing course prepares students for the English and other humanities majors through intensive reading and writing, lots of conversation, and creative work with languages and media.

Term 2

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

The Stories We Tell

 

“We’re all storytellers, really. That’s what we do. That is our power as human beings.” -- Richard Wagamese, Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations

Why do we tell stories? In this course we will explore the nature and significance of the stories that we tell—and retell—as authors, readers, and critics. Why are some stories more frequently retold than others? Why—and how—do some stories, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, become culture-texts, texts that occupy such prominent places in the popular imagination that they are collectively known and “remembered” even when the original works have never been read? What difference does it make when stories are based on actual historical events? What makes stories true? Some of the texts that we will be studying self-consciously question concepts of “story,” “history,” and “truth”; all raise questions about the nature of story-telling, interpretation, identity, and society.

You will be required to have read Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (Vintage) in its entirety by Tuesday, January 20th (the third week of term). Please begin reading before term begins.

Course requirements:

  • thoughtful and informed participation (1% for each lecture and small-group discussion class) - 20%
  • in-class essay #1 - 15%
  • in-class essay #2 - 15%
  • at-home paper (approximately 1500 words) - 20%
  • Canvas Discussions post (4%) and reply (1%) - 5%
  • final exam - 25%

Our texts:

Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (Vintage); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview print edition, eBook); a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century illustrated editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Rare Books and Special Collections, UBC Library); Elizabeth LaPensée and K.C. Oster, Rabbit Chase (Annick Press); the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) Elders, “Ch’ich’iyúy: The Two Sisters” (.pdf to be posted on Canvas); selections from Richard Wagamese, Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations (Douglas & McIntyre print edition, UBC Library eBook (the eBook does not include the splendid photographs)); a selection of poems (all available online) by Sarah Howe, Theresa Muñoz, and Alice Te Punga Somerville.

 

Term 2

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Horror/Science: Gothic Echoes in Science Fiction

“It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter IV.

Over 40 years ago, Patrick Brantlinger argued in “The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction” that a problem in reading Science Fiction as “realistic prophecy … arises from the fact that the conventions of science fiction derive from the conventions of fantasy and romance, and especially from those of the Gothic romance. Science fiction grows out of literary forms that are antithetical to realism.” More recently, two 2019 essays by Daniel Pietersen on Sublime Horror (republished on his own site), “The universe is a haunted house – the Gothic roots of science fiction” and “Spiders and flies – the Gothic monsters of sci-fi horror,” explore the intersection of terror and horror tropes in what we can only call Gothic Science Fiction.

This course is not about slick shiny optimistic visions of the future. It’s not about science research that has vastly benefitted worlds and their inhabitants: it’s about bizarre singular passion projects and their progeny, about science gone wrong, about the byways of pseudoscience. We will examine contemporary approaches to the Gothic and apply them to various primary texts.

Core texts tentatively include Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 edition); Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and/or H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau; Alien (dir. Ridley Scott) and another film or novel (possibly Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake), as well as Gardner and Diaz, Reading and Writing About Literature (6th edition). Through readings in current criticism and theory, we will develop strategies for textual analysis in literary and cultural studies. We will also consider the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reaching a “fixed” or consensus reading of any text.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a midterm essay and a term paper (both requiring secondary academic research), a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.

Keep checking my blog (https://blogs.ubc.ca/drgmbaxter/) for updates concerning texts and requirements.

Term 2

TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Haunted Houses

Where is the fascination, even when the deepest mysteries of the universe are being scientifically unlocked, in stories of haunted houses? What accounts for the lure, and even the enjoyment, of such tales of terror and horror, even in the 21st century? This course examines the Gothic influence in texts where collisions of past and present, and implications of the uncanny, allow fascinating investigations of social codes and their transgression.

Core texts tentatively include Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Alan Garner, The Owl Service; Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger; Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching; and The Others (dir. Alejandro Amenábar); as well as Gardner and Diaz, Reading and Writing About Literature (6th edition). Through readings in current criticism and theory, we will develop strategies for textual analysis in literary and cultural studies. We will also consider the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reaching a “fixed” or consensus reading of any text.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a midterm essay and a term paper (both requiring secondary academic research), a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.

Keep checking my blog (https://blogs.ubc.ca/drgmbaxter/) for updates concerning texts and requirements.

 

Term 1

MW, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

400 Years of Humanity’s Big Questions

There will be shipwrecks, magic, mad scientists, beast-people, a garden party, and his first ball. As we read stories of wrecks and disasters—structural, personal, and social— we will consider the significance of the ways these stories ask some of the big questions human beings have struggled with for centuries: What makes us human and not animal? What is human nature, and is it really natural? What about gender, race, and other kinds of difference? Who has power and why? Along with substantial work on poetry, this section of English 110 will focus on one play, one short novel, and a group of short stories that engage the different ways that people respond to circumstances that challenge what they thought was “natural” or “universal.” This course introduces students to the analytical skills and critical thinking essential to university-level literary reading, thinking, and writing, with 30-student Friday discussion groups for hands-on practice of literary analysis.

Want a head start this summer?

Choose HG Wells’ short and creepy mad scientist novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau or Shakespeare’s classic shipwreck+magic, revenge+romantasy play, The Tempest. You can stream videos of different theatre productions of Tempest for free through the UBC library or hunt out the great 2010 film, starring Helen Mirren and Djimon Hounsou.

Please note that this is not a course on writing (that’s ENGL 100 or WRDS 150): we’ll spend our time on fabulous literature rather than essay-writing instructions.

And remember: UBC Law, Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, and Education all require 6 credits of first year English, so this course will qualify you for lots of future paths!

Term 1

MW, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

After Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is by far the most influential work of literature in the English language. It has inspired plays, films, video games, comics, cartoons, stand-up comedy, dolls, cereals, and all manner of science-fiction, horror, and fantasy stories and novels. Many of these adaptations, including the most recent, have brought the concerns of their own time to bear on Shelley’s tale of scientific overreach, monstrosity, guilt, and rejection: these concerns include colonialism, racism, sexuality, artificial intelligence, the nature of life, birth, death, and society. But adaptations also enable us to see in critical and cultural perspectives, how such thorny issues, and our approaches to them, have evolved over time and alongside developments in artistic and other technologies. After reading Shelley’s original novel, we will explore a selection of adaptations of Frankenstein in fiction, film, comics, and various other media. Assignments will include both in-class and take-home writing and a final exam.

Term 1

MW, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

We’ll read a selection of short stories (some very short, some longer; some funny, some sad) from the last 200 years or so. We’ll consider the different kinds of narration, plot structure, point of view, and beginnings and endings. Students will gain an appreciation for what it means to tell stories.

Term 1

MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Literature and the Media

The course provides students with an understanding of relationships between literature and media. It further provides them with an understanding of literary genre, and of the ways in which different media function. There are modules on the electronic book, information culture, media history, Indigenous media theory, and AI. In addition, the course encourages students in reading and writing strategies that will enhance their ability to communicate ideas effectively.

Term 1

MW, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Counternarratives in comics, fiction & poetry

 Scientists use data—gathered through experimentation, for example, or measurement—to discover and interpret the world around them. What do literary scholars use? What kind of “data” is a graphic narrative, a novel, or a poem? And what can the study of literature tell us about how we interpret the world we live in? In particular, what might we learn from literature that we can’t learn by other means?

The texts on this course include local and global stories written in our current century. They will show us contemporary lives lived in different corners of the world—for example, a Vietnamese refugee in California, an Ojibwe hockey player in Ontario. These are personal stories about public events, and they are the stories that have generally been less discovered, measured, or recorded. They reveal the sometimes invisible, even erased, narratives and lives that lurk behind the headlines or history books. They invite us to ask, who gets to speak and who may be silenced? What kind of knowledge does literature give us access to—and what should we do with that knowledge?

Possible texts include The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, Medium by Johanna Skibsrud.

Term 2

MW, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

This course is intended to introduce students to the aims and techniques of university-level literary studies by exposing them to literature written in a range of genres—poetry, drama, narrative—in a range of social and historical contexts. The course balances professor’s lecture-format presentations (Mondays and Wednesdays) with more interactive discussions with TAs (Fridays).

This particular section of ENGL 110 will be organized around the relationship between works of literature, i.e. parody, allusion, quotation, homage. We will explore how allusions to both Broadway musicals and rap contribute to the meaning of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2016 musical Hamilton. We will explore Harlem Renaissance poetry’s engagement with poetic traditions through parody and allusion. We will discuss poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. The course will wrap up with Winnifred Eaton Reeve’s novel Cattle, which engages with conventions of the Western genre.

Readings will include:

  • Hamilton: The Musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda
  • Winnifred Eaton Reeve’s 1923 novel Cattle
  • Selected poems by Shakespeare, Harryette Mullen, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks

Term 2

MW, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Defining the Self

How do we define ourselves – as Canadians, as artists, as lovers, as survivors? These are some of the broad issues of identity and belonging we will explore through a selection of fiction, drama and poetry in this section of English 110.  We will consider ways in which individuals craft and perform the "selves" they wish to be, and the multiplicity of ways in which writers convey these identities through literary texts. To what extent do we control the person we become and to what extent are we shaped by our community? How meaningful are the concepts of ethnicity, gender and nationality in the creation of identity? How can a writer convey the complex and shifting nature of individual and group identity through the permanence of written discourse? Texts studied will include a novel (Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi), a play (The Rez Sisters by Tomson Highway), and a selection of short stories and poetry. In lectures and seminars, students will engage with concepts of genre and form in literature and will pursue hands-on practice of methods of literary analysis. Students will be encouraged to develop independent critical responses to the works studied. Assessment will include two in-class essays, a term paper and a final examination.

Term 2

MW, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and Us

AI is one of the most pressing technological and social questions of the current moment. Governments and corporations around the world are rushing to pour billions of dollars into AI research, all seeking to be the first to develop AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and to leverage other modes of AI (LLMs and the like). However, the concept of Artificial Intelligence is far from new, and writers have been thinking about the implications of non-human machine intelligences for centuries, in ways that range from the utopian to the apocalyptic. From the benevolent AI overseers of Asimov's imagination to the genocidal self-aware Skynet of the Terminator films, AI has been imagined as humanity's best friend and our worst nightmare, and everything in-between.

In this course we will explore the complex intimate relationships between humans and artificial intelligences through a range of literary texts. We will delve (a common LLM word) into a selection of seminal works that span various genres and perspectives, providing insights into the implications of our technological advancements on society, ethics, and identity.

The course texts will include the some of the following texts: I, RobotThe Lifecycle of Software ObjectsThe Murderbot Diaries, vol 1 (the two novellas All Systems Red and Artificial Condition); Klara and the Sun; a range of short fiction; and a selection of films on AI.

Term 2

MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2
MW, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Strange Science, Monsters, Robots, and Literary Theory

In this section of English 110, we will read literary texts depicting strange science, monsters, robots, and artificial life. The course will teach you to think and write critically about literature at the university level. It will also introduce you to contemporary literary theories. We will examine a range of approaches to the interpretation of literature, including Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial, and use the theories to analyze the literature we study. Texts read will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil,” and Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).

Term 1

MW, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Manifesting the People in Writing and Speech  

Government is everywhere. Governments aren’t perfect.  One result of this pair of intersecting truisms is the preoccupation with calling for and making a difference that runs through so much political writing and speech. Whether in addresses to a crowd or in written exhortations, political writing and speech aims to make something happen, and that something, most often, is change. This course considers texts whose writers address what they frame—or seek to call into being—as an audience of political change agents: the people. Texts considered may include manifestos, open letters, instruction books, political addresses, broadsides, pamphlets, movies, political cartoons, and/or memes. In a packet of theoretical excerpts, the course will introduce you to critical frames for considering these texts and their kinds, and your own and your colleagues’ critical and political agency in relation to them. In a series of written and multimedia assignments, individual and collaborative, this course will prompt you to produce analyses of political discourse—and a short political discourse of your own.

Term 1
TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Rhetoric, Controversy, & Propaganda

How does everyday language work to influence our thoughts and actions? This course delves into the realm of rhetoric – the motivation of belief and action, which encompasses not only overt techniques of persuasion and propaganda, but also the quotidian aspects of language and symbol usage that facilitate (or hinder) our daily lives and organize society. In order to work on their own communication skills, students will study and implement argumentative, critical, and stylistic techniques by analyzing the rhetoric of contemporary and historical public controversies, such as the politics of climate change, the public function of science, and whatever current controversies fill the headlines this semester.

 

Term 2

MW, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Metaphor and Friends: How Language Reflects (and Supports) our Creativity

Most of us believe that our everyday communication is essentially conducted via literal language. The goal of this course is to show you that there are at least two ways in which such a belief is not accurate. First, much of what we communicate, whether in conversations with peers or in an academic context, relies heavily on figurative expressions. We will consider various areas of communication (conversation, journalism, politics, science, literature, etc) to see how our everyday language relies on metaphor and its “friends” (whom we will meet in class!).

Secondly, contemporary communication also relies heavily on images (many scholars refer to such uses as ‘multimodal)’. We will study examples of various multimodal genres (ads, campaigns, memes, etc.) to understand how and why language works together with images. Through these two strands, we will see why language can be (metaphorically!) described as a toolkit supporting creativity and problem solving.

We will read about relevant concepts and read to see language at work. We will spend much time in class discussing examples (some of which you yourselves will bring for our consideration and enjoyment). And we will also write, so as to engage closely with texts, examples, and ideas, and also to give a boost to our creativity.

 


200-Level Courses

Term 1

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Migrations

This course focuses on the themes of migration and movement—of people, commodities, texts, and cultures—across a range of geographical locations and historical times.  We will also consider the related question of how and when mobilities become restricted.  Who travels and who stays?  What are the histories that have brought about forced and voluntary migrations? How are identities shaped in response to encounters with cultural difference, and through experiences of exile and displacement?  How are texts translated and adapted across different audiences and cultures? Texts we will study are likely to include Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and its adaptations; Teju Cole’s Open City; Ling Ma’s Severance; Brian Friel’s Translations; as well as a selection of poetry and film.

Term 1

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Interconnectedness

Writing in 1768, the German philosopher and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing asserted that “in nature, everything is bound together; everything interconnects, everything is interchangeable with everything else, everything changes from one thing to another.” Lessing went on to define reading as a process in which “finite spirits”—humans—can “take their share of pleasure” in interconnectedness by “develop[ing] the capacity to isolate elements and direct their attention at will.” This course approaches interconnectedness in both of these ways. Together we’ll attend to ways literary texts (poems, short stories, novels, and a play) establish and examine connections between individuals, peoples, places, spaces, species, environments, and ideas. We’ll also consider our own acts of reading: how they honour connectedness and the big picture and how, at times, considering connections requires us to focus more narrowly, on textual details and individual responses. Course assignments will prompt students to read individually and together, fostering dialogue among texts and among the members of this course.

 

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Remix: Texts, Mediation, and Cultural Power

We usually think of works of art as original creations, but every text emerges from long histories and practices of meaning-making. In other words, every text is in some ways a remix, often in terms that respond to systems of power and earlier artistic canons. This course conceives of remixing as, among other things, an aesthetic strategy and critical lens that reflects on and destabilizes multiple forms of power and authority. Remixing is a social practice indexed to different modalities of power that can also excavate alternative and minoritarian political histories and cultural practices.
This class’s varied syllabus encourages students to get into the depths of not just literary texts like novels, short stories, and poems but also films and other media artifacts. Students will be introduced to take multimedia and multi-sensory approaches to reading, analysis, and interpretation while reflecting on their relationship to literary and cultural studies as an academic formation. Texts likely to feature in the class include short stories by Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, Lee Maracle, and Eileen Chang; poetry by Joshua Whitehead; a novel by Toni Morrison; and films and video art by artists including Ani Ema Susanti, Sondra Perry, and Richard Fung.

Term 2
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Sovereignty in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature

 How does a community justify the right to rule or to self-rule? Is a king’s body in fact two? Can a survivor of violence regain control over their own body? What makes regions into a nation? In a society where women have limited rights, how can a queen rule over all? These—and many more—are questions of sovereignty, the controversial and nebulous concept that deals with the authority to decide. In this course, we will investigate how the multilingual literature of Britain before 1800—from Anglo-Norman (e.g., French) romance to Welsh poetry to early modern English drama—addresses the problem of sovereignty. All work will be read in English. We will focus on how literature lends itself to claims of political and religious sovereignty and how sovereignty underwrites national identities and British imperialism. In so doing we will also explore ecology, racialization and Indigeneity, gender and sexuality, and the politics of language, form, and genre.

 

Term 1

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

 

This course surveys British Literature from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. It aims to introduce students to a wide sampling of literary works of poetry, fiction, and drama across the period. While these works engage a diverse variety of topics, in reading them we will also want to keep in mind such themes as art and imagination, memory and history, the individual in society and freedom and repression. While taking care to situate these texts in their historical and cultural contexts, we should also, where appropriate, allow ourselves to approach them with a sense of openness and humour.

Course Requirements and Policies

Mark Breakdown:

  • Participation:  10%
  • In-class essay:  20%
  • Term paper:     40%
  • Final exam:      30%

Novels:

  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Penguin)
  • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford)
  • George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin)
  • Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (Vintage)

Poetry and Drama: The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Concise Edition, Vol. B. SECOND EDITION. Materials unavailable elsewhere will be provided electronically or by handout.

 

Term 1

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Aliens, Monsters, and Shapeshifters: (Re)Invention in Asian Canadian Literature

“She fumbles, the stutter of birthing an unwelcome / child to a violent nation that does not know it” (Natalie Wee, “Can You Speak English?”)

This section of ENGL 222 will explore the unfolding of Asian Canadian literature in a variety of genres. It will begin by considering “beginnings,” and the fraught positions of Asian Canadians in relation to the nation-state (Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child) before shifting to diasporic movements and community-formation (Kim Thúy’s Ru). The class will engage with questions related to labour and fierce embodiment (Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick a Colour, Natalie Wee’s Beast at Every Threshold), and then conclude by considering the city as an intersectional space for asserting belonging (Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough).

Term 2

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

What if… ? Speculative Literatures in Canada (where ‘Eh’ is for Apocalypse)

“The apocalyptic images are not just alarmist rhetoric: by pretty clear scientific consensus, there is ample reason to be afraid...”Catriona Sandilands, Storying Climate Change

 

“We can’t possibly live otherwise until we first imagine otherwise” —Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

 

What if global warming causes a pandemic of dreamlessness and a future where Indigenous peoples are hunted for a cure reportedly found in their bone marrow? What if scientists genetically re-engineered humanity to better survive climate apocalypse? What if you could upload your consciousness into a new body? What if cyborgs wrote poetry? What if a child’s emotional distress resulted in transformation into a giant red panda? What if... what if... what if…

Speculative literature—an umbrella category or “supergenre” associated with genres like science fiction, dystopia, fantasy, and horror—is storytelling of the what if. It alters or extends (often into uncomfortable places) the conditions of the world as we know it in order to consider what might be, and in doing so invariably returns us to what has been and is, to the contested present that prompts such creative acts of speculation. This course will introduce students to Canadian literatures in the genres of speculative fiction, examining some of the big “what ifs” being asked by Canadian and Indigenous storytellers today. We’ll read stories about climate apocalypse and consider the usefulness of imagining the end of the world. We’ll explore how the horrors of colonial history have been reimagined into dystopian neocolonial futures. And we’ll take up narratives about monstrous bodies and posthuman figures that question what it means to be human. How do such fantastic fictions function to comment on our realities? Indeed, while apocalypse and dystopia have long been spaces for writers to play out the potentially perilous futures of society’s present conditions—a tradition contemporary “cli-fi” continues in response to the very real horror of climate catastrophe—for many marginalized by those conditions, apocalypse and dystopia are not simply imaginative spaces. By exploring a diverse selection of texts and authors, we will thus attend to some of the different ways writers and artists in Canada are employing the fantastic to develop a cultural politics from speculation. Our guiding questions will include: what are the powers, possibilities, and limits of speculative genres? How does genre function differently for different writers/audiences in different contexts? What are the hopes, fears, and political imaginaries of the worlds Canadian speculative storytelling brings into being? And how does the “what if?” help us to “imagine otherwise”?

The readings and viewings will comprise novels, films, short stories, and poems in several (sometimes overlapping) SF genres—climate fiction (“cli-fi”), (post-)apocalyptic, dystopia/utopia, horror, alternate history, sci-fi, Afro- and Indigenous futurism, and urban fantasy. Primary texts will likely be selected from works by Margaret Atwood, Lindsay B-e, Jeff Barnaby, Wayde Compton, Cherie Dimaline, Hiromi Goto, Lisa Jackson, Daniel Heath Justice, Doretta Lau, and Domee Shi. Note—many of our texts, operating in fictional genres like apocalypse, dystopia, and horror, address contexts that are often uncomfortably real and challenging, and can take us to some troubling places (usually, they lead us back out of them, often to more hopeful places). We will analyze these works with care and sensitivity, but reader beware.

 

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Apartheid and its Afterlives

2024 marked 30 years since the formal end of South African apartheid, a system of white minority rule enforced with unchecked state violence. This course explores the ways in which writers turned culture into a “weapon of struggle” against apartheid and what happened to South African literature when that struggle was eventually won.

Beginning with prison poetry from the 1970s and 1980s, we’ll look at texts that exposed the cruelties of the apartheid state and imagined a radical future for the nation. The advent of democracy in the 1990s, and with it the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, provided a range of new possibilities for writers, but also a series of challenges that we’ll explore through a range of forms and genres.

Texts include (subject to change):

  • JM Coetzee - Life and Times of Michael K
  • Zoë Wicomb - Playing in the Light
  • Phaswane Mpe - Welcome to Our Hillbrow
  • Short stories by Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele and Ivan Vladislavić,
  • Poetry by Chris van Wyk, Jeremy Cronin, Dennis Brutus and Gabeba Baderoon

Term 2

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Role Playing: Drama, Performance, and Identity

According to Jacques in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players.” Drama is an ideal form for thinking about the roles we play, the cultural scripts that have been assigned to us, and how we perform who are. Along with learning how to read and analyze drama, we will explore how drama can help us think about the relationship between who we are and how we “act.” We will likely read Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Cliff Cardinal’s William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Radical Retelling, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Suzan Lori-Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, Djanet Sears, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Wig Out, and Madeline Sayet’s Where We Belong.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Beauties, Beasts, and Wonderlands

We all know the stories of Beauty and the Beast and Alice in Wonderland. Or do we?

In this course we will explore how and why Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have become culture-texts, texts that occupy such prominent places in the popular imagination that they are collectively known and “remembered” even when the original works have never been read. Questions that we will ask include: why has Le Prince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” inspired successive generations of authors and artists while Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s “La Belle et la Bête” (Le Prince de Beaumont’s source) is largely forgotten? Why is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, translated into more than 175 languages, exceptionally popular in Japan, where it has been reimagined in everything from literature and art to video games and household goods? How does Alice’s visual identity from the nineteenth century to the present (re)define her as a fashion icon?

We will also explore the ideological assumptions—with respect to gender, race, class, sexuality, mental and physical ability, the environment, ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, etc.—implicit in the texts and some of their adaptations and reimaginings, and in our and the original readers’ and viewers’ interpretations.

The focus of our discussions will be the three original texts: Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s “La Belle et la Bête,” translated by Aurora Wolfgang (UBC Library); Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast,” The Young Misses Magazine (UBC Library); and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview print edition, eBook). We will also analyze in detail Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la bête, Jonathan Miller’s 1966 telefilm Alice in Wonderland, and Elizabeth LaPensée and KC Oster’s 2022 graphic novel Rabbit Chase (Annick Press print edition, eBook). Please note that our discussions of the 1951 Disney Alice in Wonderland and the 1991 Disney Beauty and the Beast will be brief, focusing on how the films continue to define the literary works in the popular imagination.

Assignments: Assignments will include an in-class essay, an at-home paper, and a final exam.

Term 1

TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

In this course we’ll reflect on Canadian English, defined as any variety of English spoken and used in Canada. We will distinguish between Canadian English, Standard Canadian English, and start to think about what an “Inclusive Standard Canadian English” might look like. We review the state of our knowledge about Canadian English, match it to our own personal experience (or lack thereof), and other forms of English used in Canada, including Indigenous Englishes. We will approach Canadian English from sociolinguistic and sociohistorical perspectives: How did it come about? Who decided when that Canadian English was its own variety? Why is it the way it is? Why do some not know much about it (perhaps you)? Bring a curious and open mind.

Deliverables:

  • Class presentation: 5 minutes on a feature of Canadian English
  • Project: we aim to improve Wikipedia coverage on Canadian English
  • Exams: midterm and final exam

Select materials (to be completed):

Term 2

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

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

*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 by considering place and power in local literatures, looking to such narrative forms as short stories, novels, poetry, creative non-fiction, speculative fiction, and digital media. Assignments will position you in place and community and encourage students to understand themselves as variously “inside” the stories of place we study, enabling you to analyze place-based texts, mix critical and creative modes of inquiry, and bring student class participants collaboratively together.

Term 1
MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Indigenous Literatures, through Time and Space

ENGL 231 explores the ways that Indigenous peoples have sought to overcome the legacy of colonialism and achieve self-determination through literary and other forms of cultural production and critique. 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. We will be examining both critiques of mainstream representations of Indigenous peoples in scholarly articles and readings, as well as Indigenous perspectives on popular culture, urban Indigeneity, history, politics, and contemporary struggles for decolonization.

Term 2
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

MediAnthropology

While media studies has its roots in anthropology, this origin story has been relatively neglected until recently, gaining increasing attention that has culminated in the publication of studies such as Media Anthropology (2005), Anthropology of Globalization (2008), Anthropology of News and Journalism (2010), Anthropology of Images (2011), Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound (2018), Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology (2023), the 600 page Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology (2023), and Anthropology of Digital Practices (2024), to name only a few. This course draws on the instructor’s The Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter: Anthropology Upside Down (2024) to assess the anthropological beginnings of media studies before turning to an examination of various approaches to media anthropology. The course concludes with student panel presentations of media anthropological research into topics of their choice. The course will provide students with a grounding in media theory, an overview of media anthropology, and practical experience in applying this learning.

Term 1

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Synthetic Humans; Posthuman Dystopias

“We make Angels. In the service of Civilization. There were bad angels once … I make good angels now.” - Niander Wallace, Blade Runner 2049

“Whole generations of disposable people.” – Guinan, “The Measure of a Man”, Star Trek: The Next Generation (season 2)

The near-future and alternate-reality landscapes of science fiction are often terrifying places and have been since Gothic and dystopian impulses intersected in Mary Shelley’s landmark novel Frankenstein. Shelley’s tale evokes dread in the implications of Victor’s generation of a humanoid Creature; this dread echoes in more recent fictional products or accidents of science: clones, robots and replicants, artificial intelligences, cyborgs. Such texts raise issues concerning gendered exploitation, consciousness and rights, research ethics, and fear, in the realization that these creatures are, ultimately, not human but posthuman, yet often more sympathetic than their makers. However, despite their apparent superiority, such humanoids tend to be defined as commodities. In this course, we will consider the posthuman element of dystopian speculations reflecting on the present and recent past, especially concerning threats of mass surveillance, profit-motivated technology, environmental crisis, and redefinitions of human identity.

Core texts tentatively include William Gibson, Neuromancer; Madeline Ashby, vN or Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, The Matrix: Shooting Script; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve) plus one other film (or shooting script) or one other novel, to be announced.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a midterm essay, a term paper requiring secondary academic research, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.

Keep checking my blog (https://blogs.ubc.ca/drgmbaxter/) for updates concerning texts and requirements.

 

Term 2

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Speculative Fiction: Talking to Tolkien

The starting point for this course is J.R.R. Tolkien’s wildly influential The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien drew on his own interest in languages, and his own career as a professor of medieval literature, to craft the world of Middle Earth, and ever since, his work has been a touchstone in the fantasy genre. We will start with the first volume of LOTR, The Fellowship of the Ring (though of course you’re welcome to read the whole thing!) and then explore other novels that responded in different ways to Tolkien’s world-building. Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn gives us a non-human quester with a wizard sidekick and philosophical musings on humanity and mortality. Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea explores how the young wizard Ged finds his path and his power. Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire is an epic fantasy with a magic system based on metals, while Jin Yong’s A Hero Born, a hugely popular wuxia novel, combines Chinese history with kung fu magic. Finally, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring blends dystopia and Caribbean magic as its single-mother protagonist must move through a Toronto that is both familiar and strange.

Term 1

MWF,  2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

TTh, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM 

Adaptation: ‘Which was better, the book or the film?’

The above question has too often become the cornerstone of modern debates around adaptation. Our objective in this course will be to reframe the ways in which we might consider and discuss the many and varied relationships between various genres of literature and film. The scope of our discussion will range from detailed examinations of particular passages and scenes to the re-definition of concepts and re-shaping of terminology in an effort to explore how literature and film can speak to each other as different but equal partners. Instead of considering adaptation as a lit-centric field, in which the value of a film is based on its fidelity to the ‘original’ text, we’ll look at the ways in which film and literature engage in fruitful and productive conversations with each other.

We’ll consider how stories adapt to the aesthetic and commercial demands of multiple genres – novels, comic books, short stories, screenplays, and films. In the process, we’ll read some adaptation theory and study the cultural contexts surrounding both the source text and its adaptation. In so doing, we’ll explore the ways in which these two different media use diverse forms of technological representation to engage with a number of cultural and social issues. We’ll finish the course by considering more recent attempts within the field of adaptation to move beyond the unidirectional movement of literature to film, as content moves away from notions of a single, stable source and an identifiable author, and towards an era of transmedia creation by multiple entities and media conglomerates.

Term 2

TTh, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM 

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Hard-boiled and Noir

Admiring French film critics coined the term “Noir” to describe stylized, moody, atmospheric, politically-charged, morally-ambiguous American films from the 1940s and 1950s about ordinary people who commit extraordinary crimes. These films were quirkily and sometimes surreally adapted from Gothic, mystery, and especially “hard-boiled” detective stories from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Since the 1960s, Noir has become a global phenomenon whose authors adapt its persistently sinister tropes of greed, murder, cynicism and cruelty to comment on the critical issues of their time, including psychic malaise, racial identity, class power, and gender violence. This course will survey hardboiled and noir fiction and film to probe their aesthetic, psychological, and political implications. We will read several classic hardboiled and noir texts to define its modes and assumption and to differentiate them from other forms of detective fiction. We will also read a selection of recent American and global noir novels offering fresh perspectives on the genre’s racial, gender, and class politics. Assignments will include in-class writing assignments and a final exam; students will also have a chance to develop creative skills by writing their own hard-boiled or noir story.

 


300-Level Courses

Term 1

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

This introduction to critical theory is themed around crowds, democracy, and politics. We will explore theories of agency and forms of democracy, phenomena such as group aggression and utopianism, technologies for the persuasion and control of crowds, ideologies underlying populisms and authoritarianisms, and philosophies of bare life and biopolitics. It seems an appropriate moment to rethink the crowd and its history, when asylum seeking and global migrations, d/evolving democracies, virtual-digital crowds, and crowd-based political movements around the world are calling for our attention. We will also draw on the literary as a productive archive for this critique. As we proceed, we will build a theory of the performativity of the crowd.

Readings and films include selections from Marx, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Le Bon, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Fritz Lang, Sean O’Casey, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, Jacques Ranciére, others.

Term 2
TTh, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

History and Theory of Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric

What is rhetoric, and how do persuasion and influence work? How you can persuade your friends, family, colleagues, and strangers? Some of the most infamous historical intellectuals vehemently disagree about the answers to these questions, but taken together, their answers provide a blueprint for rhetorical theory. By reading and applying rhetorical theories advanced by important thinkers in major epochs of world history, students will learn about how rhetoric was supposed to function in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient China, medieval Arabia, and elsewhere, as well as how these theories still function (or not) today.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Hybrid Delivery

In this course we will be tracing the development of the English language from its Indo-European beginnings to the Middle English period. We will deal with the internal development of the language (its ‘structure’) on all levels: sounds (phonology), grammar (morphology & syntax), word meaning (semantics) and orthography and some select pragmatic features (language in use). We will also explore the most important events in the language-external history (‘political, social and cultural history’) that shaped the language. As we are covering a period of more than a thousand years, our aim is to put the various stages of development in relation to each other: what happened when and with what results – and, if possible, why. Along the way we will be dealing with texts from different periods.

Requirements:

  • Group presentation
  • Etymology research project
  • Midterm and final exams

Core Readings:

  • Knooihuizen, Remco. 2023. The Linguistics of the History of English. Cham: Springer.
  • Brinton, Laurel J. and Leslie K. Arnovick. 2016. The English Language: A Linguistic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Term 2
MW, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

As of June 16, 2025: This course is being offered in Term 2

This course will introduce you to the basics of how English is described and used in both spoken and written forms. First we will consider and evaluate the notions of descriptivism and prescriptivism, and learn about standardization and the history behind modern English grammar rules (Unit 1). Next, we will discuss key parts of the English grammatical system: parts of speech; noun and verb phrases; clause structure; and tense, aspect, and mood (Unit 2). Finally, we will take a broader look at English usage and variation, from the evolving language of Internet English to variation in Englishes around the world (Unit 3).

Required texts:

  • Berk, Lynn, English Syntax: From Word to Discourse. (Oxford University Press, 1999.)Curzan, Anne, Fixing English: Prescriptivims and Language History. (Cambridge University Press, 2014.)McCulloch, Gretchen, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. (Riverhead Books, 2019).

Course assessments include a brief essay (Unit 1); a midterm exam and self-testing homework exercises (Unit 2); and a group project that explores some aspect of variation in English (Unit 3). The final exam is comprehensive.

Term 2
Online Asynchronous

The fully online stylistics course explores the creativity of literary language use. Before embarking on doing stylistics, we consider the significant shifts that have taken place in the development of stylistics up to the current interest in cognitive and corpus stylistics. A large part of the course work involves analyzing examples of poems, prose narratives and plays using stylistic tools to identify and interpret their respective characteristic communication strategies.

The term paper focuses on selected findings that have been reported in a recent corpus stylistic study on the writing style of a famous novelist (and Nobel laureate). You will be asked to replicate a few of these published findings in your own small-scale analysis of an extract or a very short story by the same author. By comparing your findings with the published findings you will be enabled to substantiate your own interpretation of the narrative you analyzed.

Requirements:

  • 2 Workshops with recorded presentations
  • Term paper
  • Graded discussions
  • Graded exercises
  • Final exam

Textbooks:

  • Short, Mick. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. Longman, 1996.
  • Simpson, Paul. Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students, 3rd ed. Routledge, 2026 (if available in time, otherwise 2nd ed. Routledge, 2014).

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Hybrid Delivery

How many Englishes are there? What’s English anyway? What is Canadian English? What is Pidgin English? In this class we take a close, conceptual look at linguistic variation in English, to be precise: in Englishes. Beginning with a classic model, we’ll read and discuss texts that model variation in L1, L2 and Lingua Franca Englishes, World Englishes and Global Englishes. We will write short reflection pieces on some texts that prepare us for a mini in-class conference with friendly feedback and an ensuing term paper on a variety of English of your choice (from a curated list).

Text:

  • Jenkins, Jennifer. 2025. Global Englishes: A Resource Book for Students. 4th edition. Routledge.

Requirements:

  • Student reflections
  • Oral presentation at mini conference
  • Midterm and final exams

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

The Language of the Media

There has been much interest recently in the impact that contemporary media (print news, social media and image-text communication) have on public discourse and public trust in information. In the course, we will study a range of language forms and communication genres to understand better the nature of contemporary public discourse and to build an informed approach to the communicative universe we live in. We will start by discussing selected language phenomena, such as types of figuration, linguistic constructions, and expressions of stance.  After establishing introductory concepts, we will focus on several case studies, looking more specifically at the discourse of major campaigns and crises (e.g. Brexit, COVID, climate change), political discourse genres (speeches and election campaigns), the role of post-truth phenomena, and internet discourse genres (memes and ads). Students will be expected to participate in in-class discussions and projects, engage with readings, collect their own media examples, and use their analytical skills throughout.

Term 2
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Cognitive Poetics

Language use in literary texts builds on standard forms and concepts, while pushing their meaning potential to the limits by extending or re-designing what is available. Such mechanisms of creativity are the subject matter of this course. To understand the processes involved and learn how textual meaning is built and received, we study cognitive approaches to language and apply the concepts to literary discourse and other creative genres. We study poetry, narrative fiction, and drama, also by putting these genres in the context of contemporary discourse and visual culture (film, internet memes, advertising, political and cultural campaigns, etc.). The concepts investigated show students how to connect the study of language and literature to an understanding of how the human mind processes and creates meaning. This approach, combining the study of language, literature, and conceptualization, is known as Cognitive Poetics.

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

This class focuses on “everyday metaphors”: the figurative language that we use all the time, over the course of casual conversations and throughout our lives, often without even realizing it. While we may think our colloquial use of language is mostly literal, we rely on metaphors to talk about all sorts of ideas and situations. For example, we may talk about “fighting” crime, “waging war” on a pandemic, or “battling” poverty. In all these cases, we are describing one type of concept - a serious societal challenge - in terms of another concept, physical combat. But what does it mean to describe a pandemic as a “war”, versus a “wildfire” or a “journey”? Not only are these types of patterns pervasive throughout our language use, they also influence how we understand these concepts.

In this course, you will learn how to identify and analyze figurative language in a variety of texts and media, and also consider the persuasive role of metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon. In the first part of the course, we will learn about various types of figurative language (metaphor, metonymy, blending). In the second part, we will apply these theoretical concepts to a range of genres, from health care to poetry. We will also consider the role of figurative language beyond the written and spoken word, such as gesture, memes, and other forms of multimodality.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

  • Identify and analyse figurative language in a variety of texts, genres, and media
  • Understand and apply core concepts in cognitive linguistics, including metaphor theory and frame semantics
  • Read and comprehend scholarly articles in the field of metaphor studies
  • Develop an original metaphor analysis and present it in spoken and written form
  • Engage in critical academic discussion with both peers and scholarly literature

Required textbook: 

Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser. Figurative Language. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Term 1

Online Asynchronous

As of June 16, 2025 this course is being offered in Term 1

This course explores and examines contemporary English phonology, morphology and lexical semantics. It begins with the study of speech sounds in English. We apply methods for phonetic transcription and study distinct sounds and possible sound combinations in English (phonology). We study the processes of word formation and word classification in English (morphology). We also study word meaning (lexical semantics) using a variety of approaches.

Upon completion of this course, students will:

  • understand the English sound system, including sounds that are used in speech production and the rules and patterns governing their use;
  • understand the rules of English word formation and grammatical modification;
  • understand different approaches to representing and analyzing lexical meaning;
  • demonstrate the ability to formally or diagrammatically represent this knowledge;
  • appreciate the nuances of meaning in human language and the conceptual system underlying it.

Required textbook:

Brinton, Laurel J., and Donna M. Brinton. The Linguistic Structure of Modern English. John Benjamins, 2010.

Term 2

Online Synchronous with Zoom meetings set by instructor
Thursdays, 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This online course focuses on the structure of modern English beyond the level of the word. We study how words and phrases are combined in English sentence structure (syntax) from a generative perspective. Our focus will be on both simple and complex sentences. We will also study meaning in sentences (sentence semantics) and how language functions in context (pragmatics).

Upon completion of this course, students will have:

  • a knowledge of the structure of simple and complex sentences in English and the ability to represent this knowledge diagrammatically
  • an appreciation of the nuances of meaning in human language and a knowledge of the conceptual system underlying meaning
  • an understanding of the use of language in context.

Course evaluation: There will be 3 tests, 3 quizzes and a class participation mark. The tests are not cumulative. A variety of in-class, homework and test questions will be given, including problem solving, short answer, and multiple-choice questions, but the emphasis will be on representing English sentence structure diagrammatically.

Required Text: L. Brinton. (2010) The Structure of Modern English. (2nd ed.). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Chapters 7-11.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM 

On the (pre-)history of television

This course explores the long history and prehistory of television. As technology, television emerged quite slowly from experiments with nineteenth-century technologies (such as telegraphy and phototelegraphy) that reproduce and transmit visual and sound images across space and time. As an institution and medium, television developed out of radio (in the 1930s) to become a standard feature in homes after the 1940s in North America and elsewhere. Even a brief glance at television, as both technology and as medium, quickly opens out onto larger social, political, and cultural histories.

This course approaches these broader histories by reading literature and thinking across media forms. Writing and print, themselves mediums, compete and collaborate with newer media that pertain to writing (based on -graphy technologies). By paying close attention to writing and poetics (ideas about how writing works), we will explore perceptual regimes that accompany new technologies, the media institutions that capture them, and the discourses by which they are understood. Note: our geographical focus will mostly, but not exclusively, be the United States.

This course will be taught as a mix of lecture and discussion. We will read literary, critical, and theoretical texts, watch television, view films, and listen to radio as we seek to gain a deep historical sense of the medium. Our learning objectives include:

  • to familiarize students with broader histories of television and its emergence from 19th- and early 20th-century technologies and institutions
  • to introduce students to literary tools for approaching media history
  • to broaden media literacy by helping students to think and write critically about television and other media

Term 2
Online Asynchronous

Media ecologies in the Atlantic world, 1650 to the present

This course begins by defining “media ecology” as a “coevolution” among technologies, their users, the materials from which technologies are made, and the communities and networks in which makers, users, and materials participate. It examines the history of the idea of “media” and “mediation” from the early modern period to the present, and in conjunction with kinds and sites of media and mediation typically overlooked in media histories, including Indigenous knowledge-keeping, ceremony, and diplomacy and Black community production and circulation of texts. The course is organized comparatively, bringing print and digital media forms into conversation, along with a broadened sense of what “mediation” is and might be. The learning design and assessments for this course draw on comparative modes of inquiry.

The course combines theoretical and historical reading and investigation with hands-on, project-based learning. You will investigate the historical development of knowledge technologies, broadly understood, experience and reflect on their practical use, examine them in relation to broader approaches to mediation and media history, consider what it means to inquire into the experiences and lives of those who have worked with and used technological forms and participated in other modes of mediation contemporary with them, and use digital and analog media to organize and explain your findings. You will also engage with media ecologies in a second sense, considering the relationship between media, their material qualities, and the resources and practices of the surrounding world. Finally, you will consider literary texts that reflect on their own relationship to media and mediation, bringing media historical questions productively into view.

Term 1

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Old English Language and Translation

“You must remember we knew nothing of [Old English]; each word was a kind of talisman we unearthed…And with those words we became almost drunk.” -–Jorge Luis Borges, “Blindness”

Old English, the earliest written form of English, offers an uncanny sensation: so different from present-day English that it must be studied as a foreign language, it is an ancestor whose patterns reveal themselves quickly to the learner. Old English literature is strange, intimate, and violent: a general falls into his bed after a woman’s brutal swordstroke; a feud erupts at a wedding; a tree, torn from the wilderness to become an unwilling instrument of torture, clings to Christ in what Borges calls a lovers’ embrace. This literature is usually read in translation, but in this class you will begin to read it in the original. You will learn the fundamentals of Old English grammar, syntax, and vocabulary; specialized poetic vocabulary and the basic rules of poetic composition; and unusual features that have been lost in the journey from Old to present-day English.

Term 2
TTh, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

The Arthur of the Britons

King Arthur, Lancelot, Guenevere, the Round Table, the Holy Grail - these names familiar to many of us, but how did that happen? How did stories that originated in early medieval Britain end up so widespread and popular that they’re still being retold today? In this course, we go back to the beginning. We’ll look at the strange Welsh poems and tales that might show us the oldest versions of Arthur. We will read the twelfth-century Latin history that gave the world the first connected life story for Arthur. These texts will be read in translation, but we’ll also read poetry and prose in Middle English, moving gently through the amazing alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as well as Sir Thomas Malory’s prose Morte D’Arthur, the text most responsible for passing the stories of Arthur and his knights to the post-medieval English-speaking world. There’s an apartment building in Vancouver called “Sir Galahad” – by the end of this course, you’ll recognize the reference, and also be able to appreciate just how weird that really is.

Term 1

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Chaucer: Canterbury Tales

This course will introduce you to the world of Chaucer and late medieval English literary culture. You will read stories of trickery and adventure, of romance and revelry, as Chaucer’s pilgrims travel through a world rich in satire and social commentary. Chaucer’s characters have left indelible marks on English literature, both in their medieval incarnations and their traces and influence on other texts over the centuries. Jealous carpenters, drunken millers, aggressive wives, and lecherous priests jostle for attention with pious parsons, wealthy monks, and noble knights. The late medieval world is brought to riotous life in Chaucer’s words, constructing an age that – far from being dark – explodes in polycromatic and polyvocal splendour.

In this 13-week course we will read (most of) Chaucer’s best-known work, The Canterbury Tales, and by the end of the course you will be comfortable both with reading Middle English and working within the literary culture of the late fourteenth century.

Term 1

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Madness and Folly in the Renaissance

Madness and folly fascinated Renaissance humanists, who celebrated the figure of the “witty jester” or “wise fool” in their writings. In this course, we will explore various depictions of “unreason” or irrationality in Renaissance texts, paying particular attention to the paradoxical discourses that often seem to accompany such representations. Among others, we will examine descriptions of love as a malady in early modern medicine and as a source of inspiration in Neo-Platonic, Petrarchist, and Elizabethan poetry, analyze the age-old association between melancholy and genius in humoral theory, consider the power of the imagination in Montaigne’s Essays, and compare playful personifications of Folly in works by Erasmus and Louise Labé. We will also study representations of madness and folly in two of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Hamlet and King Lear) along with some more recent readings from cultural theory and the social sciences.

Term 2
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

One of the literary forms that now seems distinctively early modern to us is the essay. In this course, we’ll read the two greatest essayists of the period: the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne and the Englishman Sir Thomas Browne. Both were highly intelligent, well read, unfailingly curious about more or less everything, and frequently weird. They thought often and well about the world they lived in; we’ll think with them.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Shakespeare and the Idea of the Nation

What is a nation? What does it mean to be, and how does one become, a part of a nation? These are certainly important questions now, and they were equally important in Shakespeare’s day as England was still establishing itself as a nation. We will read works by Shakespeare and examine the nation as a category of belonging and exclusion that intersects with concerns about race, gender, sexuality, and language. We will read Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Cymbeline. Class assignments will include short papers, a close reading assignment, and a research-based final project.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Mediatic Shakespeare

Drawing on the instructor’s Mediatic Shakespeare (UTP 2025), the course provides a unique focus on the plays of Shakesepeare, arguing that many of them dramatise the early modern media shift out of a largely oral culture into a culture that is increasingly literate, a shift exacerbated by the growing prominence of print. The course will introduce students to media theory, as well as to the historical and cultural contexts of Shakespeare’s work.

Term 2
Online Asynchronous

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

The only text in this course is Milton’s Paradise Lost. We’ll move through at the leisurely pace of one book per week. Our primary focus will be on the poem as poetry. No prior experience with Christianity or the Bible is necessary.

Term 1

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

So much drama! Eighteenth-century stage comedy

After the silence of the Puritan Commonwealth, London’s theatres burst into social, artistic and ideological prominence (and no small fabulousness) with the restoration of King Charles II. Through several types of comedy, from subversive and smutty to heartfelt and sentimental (with a sidequest on mad burlesque), the six plays in this course contributed to cultural dialogues on the relative identities of the nation and the individual through such conflicting elements as heroics, religious critique, brilliant wit, political subversion, and some rather explicit sex. We will consider the ways in which English playwrights and stage practices both queried and reinscribed ideas of sexuality and marriage, gender normativity, intellect and passion, and violence and its burlesques, as well as the ways the theatrical genres of the era embraced both spectatorship and readership and made the political into the (very) personal.

Looking for a head start this summer?

Consider the pairing of Wycherley’s Country Wife and Behn’s The Rover, two very different takes—sparklingly witty and pitch dark—on the Restoration’s most lasting genre, witty libertine sex comedy. Or try the quite startling, proto-postmodern comedy with a Nabokov-esque mad editor in Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies.

 

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2
TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

The Music of Romanticism

The seraph-band, each waved his hand,
No voice did they impart,
No voice; but oh! The silence sank,
Like music on my heart.

Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (496-99)

Songs were among the most popular media of the period in British literary history we now know as the “Romantic” (1780-1830), but British Romanticism is rarely considered to have been a musical phenomenon. This course corrects that oversight. By way of the period’s most innovative and influential lyric genres—songs, ballads, tales, sonnets (“little songs”), melodies, and improvisations—we will dive deeply into the meter, rhythm, sound, diction, poetic devices, and literary effects of individual lyrics. We will examine the ways Romantic-era poets weaved musical forms into the silent medium of print, anticipating and encouraging a tension between the intellectual work of poetry and the populist spirit of music that persists to our own day. We will also contemplate the importance of music to Romanticism’s political impulses and to explore how poetic music opens up questions of feeling, environment, volition, desire, identity, race, sexuality, personal growth, and social order. Primary readings will feature poems by Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson, William Blake, Thomas Moore, and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL). Writing assignments will encourage students to extend their creative, critical, and research skills. No previous education, skill, or talent in music is necessary to succeed in this course—but enjoying music and being open to its spirit and effects will definitely help.

 

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Some Versions of American Gothic

Authors may include Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, and J. D. Salinger. Their works trace the sources of American darkness to the realities of a violent history represented in sometimes forthright but more often in formally vexed and psychologically distorted ways. Students will write short essays in class; engage in discussion and exchange in the classroom; do informal close readings (aloud); and write one longer take-home essay. There will also be a final exam.

Please note: this course is resolutely unfriendly to AI tools and CHATGPT etc. The confirmed reading list will posted by November 2025.

Term 2
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

The Victorian Novel

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
–  Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

In this section we will explore the social, aesthetic, and economic contexts that informed the nineteenth century’s most popular genre, the novel. Despite its relative predominance, the Victorian novel is more diverse than monolithic, and we will be paying close attention to a variety of nineteenth-century fictional modes, including social comedy, realism, detective fiction, and the gothic.

 PLEASE NOTE: reading in advance is STRONGLY ENCOURAGED. Victorian novels are not known for their brevity.

Reading List

  • Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
  • Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
  • Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
  • Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
  • Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  • Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Evaluation

  • Informed Participation: 10%
  • Regular Reading Quizzes: 10%
  • Midterm: 20%
  • Term Paper: 30%
  • Final Exam: 30%

Term 2

TTh, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The Victorian Fairy Tale: Text and Image

 

“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice,
“without pictures or conversations?”

During the Victorian period there were more illustrated books and periodicals in circulation than ever before. Publishers exploited the power of the visual to attract readers, commissioning illustrators who were as well known, sometimes better known, than the authors. The illustrations often attracted as much attention—and, yes, sometimes more attention—than the texts, and represent the earliest published responses to the literary works.

In this course we will explore the relationship between text and image in a selection of Victorian fairy tales, both original tales and rewritings of traditional tales. How do the illustrations define the literary texts? To what extent do the illustrations reinscribe, revise, and/or subvert the assumptions, both aesthetic and ideological (e.g., with respect to gender, race, class, sexuality, mental and physical ability, the environment, ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, etc.), implicit in the tales and in our—and the Victorians’—readings of them?

Approximately half of our classes will take place in UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections where we will work with early editions of the tales and discuss them in relation to Victorian print culture. We will ask such questions as: To what extent does the dominance of George Cruikshank’s designs for the Fairy Library obscure his intention to promote the temperance movement? How does reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the first edition, for which the placement of the illustrations was carefully planned by both John Tenniel and Lewis Carroll, influence the interpretation of the text? How do the binding, cover design, and decorations and illustrations by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon define Oscar Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates as a work of the Aesthetic movement and/or a collection of fairy tales?

Our illustrated tales

  • John Ruskin and Richard Doyle, The King of the Golden River
  • George Cruikshank, “Hop-o’my-Thumb and the Seven-League Boots” and “Cinderella and the Glass Slipper”
  • Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
  • Christina Rossetti and D. G. Rossetti, “Goblin Market”
  • Christina Rossetti and Arthur Hughes, Speaking Likenesses
  • George MacDonald and Arthur Hughes, “The Light Princess”
  • Mary de Morgan and William de Morgan, “A Toy Princess”
  • Mary de Morgan and Walter Crane, “The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde”
  • Oscar Wilde, Walter Crane, and Jacomb Hood, “The Happy Prince”
  • Oscar Wilde, Ricketts, and C. H. Shannon, “The Birthday of the Infanta”
  • Evelyn Sharp and Mabel Dearmer, “The Boy who Looked Like a Girl”
  • Kenneth Grahame, Maxfield Parrish, and E. H. Shepard, “The Reluctant Dragon”
  • Nesbit and H. R. Millar, “The Prince, Two Mice, and Some Kitchen-Maids” and “Melisande: Or, Long and Short Division”

Links to digitized editions of our illustrated tales will be posted in UBC Library Online Course Reserves. If you would like to purchase a twenty-first-century edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with a helpful introduction and notes, I highly recommend the Broadview edition (print copy, eBook). The following editions are also excellent, though we will only be discussing a few of the tales that they include: George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin and Other Fairy Tales (Broadview); Oscar Wilde, The Complete Short Stories (Oxford World’s Classics); and Victorian Fairy Tales, edited by Michael Newton (Oxford World’s Classics).

 

 

Term 2
Online Asynchronous

Modernist Literature

Some descriptions of modernism are bloodless abstractions about formal experimentation, academic disruption, and modernist reaction against a too-rigid bourgeois morality. This course concentrates on the wildly passionate commitment of moderns to changing the world, to finding new sensations and affects, to overcoming historical evils and biases, to appreciating with sincere admiration other arts, other peoples, cultures and languages, and other places.

Topics include Decadence, the New Woman, Expressionism, Dada, Manifesto Modernism, New Objectivity, Impressionism, the Surreal and Psychoanalytic, Gesamtkunstwerk and Encyclopedism, Minimalism, Montage, Technological Moderns, Graphic Modernisms. Writers include Stein, H.D., Loy, Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, O’Casey, Beckett, Barnes, Stevens, Larsen, Rhys, others.

Term 1
TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Fifty Years of U.S. Fiction

This course will immerse students in major U.S. novels of the 1970s to the 2020s, including some very recently published work. For an eclectic reading list our topics of interest will be likewise eclectic, but some subjects for examination will include the depth of racialized suffering in U.S. history; the legacy of wars and imperial struggle in Vietnam, Iraq, Hawaii, Philadelphia, and elsewhere; and the ongoing use of genres of the detective, the spy, the road, horror, and more. Texts likely to be included (subject to change): Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977); Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (1979); Joan Didion, Democracy (1984); John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (1990); Don DeLillo, Point Omega (2010); Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket (2025).

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Post-Apartheid South African Literature

“It was easier to write about the past . . . because the past created ready-made stories. There was a very clear demarcation between good and evil . . . Black was good; white was bad.  Your conflict was there. There were no gray areas. We no longer have that. In this new situation, black is not necessarily good. There are many black culprits; there are many good white people. We have become normal. It’s very painful to become normal.” (Zakes Mda)

Fifty years of oppression under the South African apartheid system inspired an impressive corpus of protest literature, but how have writers responded to the collapse of the racist regime and its replacement with a democratic constitution?  Our study of recent South African writing will include Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Kopano Matlwa's Coconut and Sello Diuker’s Thirteen Cents.

 

Term 1

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

The Cold War in Asia: Asian American and Asian Canadian Responses

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 capalist 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.

By reading novels, a novella, poetry, and a memoir that move us through the Chinese civil war, the Korean war, the wars in Southeast Asia, and North Korea, we will explore the legacies of Cold War logics and the afterlife of the wars in Asia for Canadians and Americans. How do these contradictory memories and competing historical narratives shape how Asians in North America imagine themselves and are understood by non-Asians? How does what critic Jodi Kim calls the “protracted afterlife” of the Cold War continue to influence current conversations about migration, citizenship, and global events and politics? We will contextualize our discussions of these literary texts with critical and theoretical material and documentary films in order to think critically about these competing cultural representations and the narratives they produce.

Required Readings (subject to change):

  • Samantha Lan Chang, Hunger
  • Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker
  • Madeleine Thien, Dogs at the Perimeter
  • Souvankham Thammavongsa, Found
  • Vinh Nguyen, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse
  • Krys Lee, How I Became a North Korean

 Additional theoretical readings will be available via UBC Library.

 

Term 1

Online Asynchronous

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2
TTh, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Canadian Literature: Reading the Climate Emergency

Nature has always been at the core of Canadian artistic production. Over the past two hundred years, however, creative responses to the environment have changed dramatically. In the past few decades, with the increasing recognition of the climate emergency, artists are less apt to either passively address the land or render it sentimentally, and more apt to imagine an altered state of environmental change, even degradation. Contemporary writers often look at the effects of human interaction, resource extraction, and economic exploitation on Canadian land and waters. One strand of nature writing employs a poetics of warning as writers speculate on the effects of the tar sands on global warming, the relationships between Indigenous land claims and strip mining, the impacts of oil transportation on British Columbian riverbeds, or the consequences of the genetic modification of crop plants on prairie ecosystems. In parallel to the creative work, much scholarship has turned to discussions of human/non-human interaction, bioregional studies, postcolonial ecocriticism. In this course we will read critical work about the environment alongside fiction, poetry, drama, film, and visual art produced in Canada.

Term 2
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Indigenous Futurisms

In this course we will consider the intersections between critical theory and Indigenous Studies to explore the notion of Indigenous futurisms. To do so, we will read and discuss a selection of diverse literary and cultural texts that engage with both critical theory and Indigenous thought and practice in nuanced and creative ways, from short stories and poetry, to films and art installations. This will include examinations of historical and contemporary texts, tensions, and dialogues, which is intended to foster an understanding of the broader social, political, and historical contexts from which these critical and theoretical productions emerge. We will investigate not only engagements between Indigenous and “Western" thought, but also between Indigenous and other non-western thinkers, including from the traditions of Black studies and other anti-colonial traditions of critical analysis.

Term 1
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Stories in New Skins: Transformation, Adaptation, and Innovation in Indigenous Literatures

In Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature, scholar Keavy Martin turns to a recurring trope of transformation in Inuit stories—humans and animals exchanging their skins— to conceptualize the inherent adaptability of Inuit intellectual traditions. This course, adapting Martin’s metaphor and extending its scope to a wide range of literary arts from northern Turtle Island (Canada), will examine a variety of Indigenous storytelling cultures through the prisms of transformationadaptation, and innovation. Transformations are a prominent feature in many Indigenous cosmologies and narrative traditions, though our focus will not be (primarily) on instances of transformation within stories. Rather, this course will invite us to explore the political, cultural, and aesthetic questions that arise when we consider the various ways that Indigenous stories themselves are, or have been, transformed, adapted, and (re)published in new forms, genres, and media. How do stories change their “skins,” and why? What forces and motivations propel transformation or adaptation? The metaphor of changing skins is neither benign nor simply celebratory; it has complex ties to both renewal and violence, generative innovation and destructive disfiguration. On one hand, Canada’s literary and publishing history has often subjected Indigenous writers, texts, and knowledges to appropriation and harmful editing practices that have transformed or distorted Indigenous narratives to suit dominant ideals. On the other, and despite the eliminatory efforts of settler-colonialism—including its fictions that delimit “authentic” Indigenous cultures to a static, unchanged past—Indigenous literary artists continue to make tradition new, storying vibrant living cultures in diverse genres and technologies of representation.

With this ambivalence in mind, we’ll approach a historically and generically diverse selection of creation stories, orature, life-writing, fiction, poetry, animation, comics, film, and new media to consider the many new “skins” and remarkable breadth of contemporary Indigenous narrative traditions in Canada. From the publishing transformations of Maria Campbell’s pathclearing autobiography Halfbreed (1973) to the digital sci-fi retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story in Skawennati’s “She Falls for Ages” (2017), our texts will prompt us to critically analyze, rigorously discuss, and creatively engage the possibilities and discomforts of transformation as stories adapt, write back, reimagine, and remediate Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures.

 

Term 1
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

 

Term 2
TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.


Term 2

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Reading here and away together

This course builds student competencies in methods and practices of literary reading in conjunction with considerations of the situatedness of reading on the west coast of what is currently called Canada, in what is currently called BC and Vancouver, at UBC, and on unceded xwməθkwəy̓əm land. We will first develop theoretical vocabularies to aid us in reading “texts from elsewhere” in the context and setting of “here” and “texts from here.” We will consider a literary text from elsewhere in conjunction with a cluster of short texts by Musqueam and local Indigenous authors in dialogue with settler, diasporic, and Indigenous theories of mobilities, displacements, and understandings of place; continuing histories of settlement, colonization, dwelling, and survivance/surthrivance;relations among global and local spaces; and theories of power and its roles in, and in relation to, these topics. We will also theorize reading in dialogue with theories of reading that importantly complicate western European conceptions of what it means to read a “text” or a “book.” We will then turn to a selection of texts from elsewhere, closely reading these in conjunction with relevant learning resources local to UBC, to Musqueam, and to Vancouver and BC, including texts and learning materials from the Musqueam Nation. Our guiding questions will be: what does it, and what can it, mean, and do, to read, study, and research literature, here, at UBC and at Musqueam, and in the world? How can methods and practices of literary reading, here, best be put into dialogue with Indigenous, diasporic, and settler theories of place, emplacement, mobilities, and power, as well as practices of knowing and storying?

Online Asynchronous
Term 1

Coming of Age from the Margins: Youth, Migration, and Contemporary World Literature

This asynchronous online course draws on a range of texts from around the world to ask how contemporary literature has represented and responded to crucial issues that mark our experience of the 21st century. Focusing on the stories of young protagonists from a diverse range of settings, we will explore how migration shapes what it means to be young in the modern world, and how youth shapes our experiences of migration. Drawing on novels, short stories, and an autobiographical graphic novel, this course encourages students to think about questions of belonging, race, gender, and sexuality beyond the familiar frameworks provided by the nation-state and traditional literary forms. Texts studied include Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad, Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.

Term 2

TTh, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Vampires Among Us

But the Countess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming it. In her dream, she would like to be human; but she does not know if that is possible. The Tarot always shows the same configuration: always she turns up La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution.”  -- Angela Carter, “The Lady of the House of Love”

Despite their association with the Victorian Gothic and their implications of ancient lore, vampires’ longevity owes much to their enduring popularity, even among 21st century audiences. Their metaphorical possibilities remain vivid, potent, and diverse. When I decided to write a vampire novel, I set myself the limitations of its being contemporary in setting and secular in worldview, a narrative where its creatures of the night might manage to exist among mortals without being quite so obvious as in many tales of their doings. That process has inspired the basis of this course, where we will examine, in fiction and film, representations of vampires produced in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. While our texts might reference the famous vampire texts of the past (and even engage with characters from them), their worldview is arguably closer to ours, and their settings and characters more familiar to us.

The text list will involve 3-4 novels (possibly including but not limited to Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire; Kim Newman, Anno Dracula; Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, The Strain; and Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching), Angela Carter’s short story “The Lady of the House of Love” (from her collection The Bloody Chamber), and 1-2 films (again, likely chosen from though not necessarily limited to Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight; Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows; possibly even Ridley Scott’s Alien, which according to Daniel Pietersen’s “Spiders and Flies: The Gothic Monsters of Sci-Fi Horror”, is a vampire film owing much to Dracula). Our examination will be situated in critical and theoretical approaches to the Gothic as a contemporary area of representation.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a midterm essay and a term paper (both requiring secondary academic research), a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.

Keep checking my blog (https://blogs.ubc.ca/drgmbaxter/) for updates concerning texts and requirements.

 

Term 2
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Media Displacement

Foundational to the theory of media is the concept of extension: mechanical media (such as the automobile) extend the body, while electronic media (such as the computer) extend cognition. The effects of media are thus spatial. As extensions, however, media also displace that which they extend; they are prosthetic in the way that they function. This course examines various intersections of space, media, and displacement, including colonisation, minimalism in art, utterance as outerance, digital nomadism, and the global history movement. The course will introduce students to the basic elements of media theory, and will develop the notion of a spatial methodology. The course concludes with student panel presentations on novels that explore the intersections of space, media, and displacement.

 

Term 1

TTh, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Fantasy Fiction and History in British Children’s Literature

Children’s books can have a lasting influence on children’s views of their world and themselves. English 392 investigates how narratives of national identity are located in history and legend, and deployed in fantasy texts written for children. The main texts will include  Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, The Magician’s Nephew, and The Graveyard Book, with some additional texts. While this course cannot cover every nation, we will look at some significant fantasy texts from England, Canada and the U.S. to examine connections between particular national myths and culturally-informed identities. We will look at the ways both “classic” and less traditionally canonical children’s texts create intertextual narratives that expand, resist, subvert and adapt each other’s work. This course will require essays, group work and classroom work.

 


400-Level Courses

Term 1

T, 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Discourse and Analysis

Discourse analysis is an important area within language study that typically involves exploration of a variety of linguistic features and functions to understand meaning making in texts.  Aspects of language use examined can include semantics, syntax, phonological and phonetic structures, lexical choices, conversation skills and narrative structure. Analyses typically involve systematic descriptions of texts or corpora, with a focus on understanding how language is used in context.  Analyses of discourse may also highlight how language use functions to construct and maintain social understanding of the world.  In this seminar, students develop skills in performing discourse analyses and in evaluating discourse analysis research.  Readings include classic and recent research papers in linguistic discourse analysis, with emphasis on information structure, conversation and interaction, hesitation phenomena, narrative analysis, multimodality and indirectness. A key part of learning discourse analysis is doing it.  Students will therefore collect and transcribe some data at the beginning of the term.

Term 2

T, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Language, Nation & Colonization: the role of English

The languages of Europe’s nation states have not only been major vehicles of nation building but also of colonization. They are vehicles that exported and reified hegemonial perspectives. The connection of language and nation has indeed been so powerful that today we are still confronted with the legacies of late 18th and early 19th-century thinking in our conceptualizations of “language”. Which linguistic varieties are afforded and which denied the label “language” is not so much linguistically informed as socio-politically conditioned and here lingering colonial legacies loom large.

In this seminar we will study the roles of language in nation building and colonization, with special emphasis on the various instantiations of English. We will revisit the making of English as a national and imperial language, starting in Old English times and stretching all the way to the present. We will critically review the key achievements in the English language, such as Johnson’s dictionary, the prescriptive grammar tradition, the Oxford English Dictionary (Brewer 2007) or the Quirk et al. grammar (1985), and test their conceptualizations and presuppositions against notions that are associated with standard languages, such as homogeneity, superiority and purity.

We will see that, surprisingly, in some present-day approaches to language the discourses of hegemony still lurk in unsuspecting corners relating to what is perceived as a “legitimate” language and what not. It is safe to say that these discourses have left their mark on most if not all standard varieties, often via a stifling of Indigenous voices.

Class readings of selected papers to be forthcoming.

Deliverables:

  • Response pieces to some readings
  • Term paper on an aspect of English and nation making
  • Oral presentation

 

Term 1
T, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Mad Science: Gothic Echoes in Passion Projects Gone Wrong

Over 40 years ago, Patrick Brantlinger argued in “The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction” that a problem in reading Science Fiction as “realistic prophecy … arises from the fact that the conventions of science fiction derive from the conventions of fantasy and romance, and especially from those of the Gothic romance. Science fiction grows out of literary forms that are antithetical to realism.” More recently, two 2019 essays by Daniel Pietersen on Sublime Horror (republished on his own site), “The universe is a haunted house – the Gothic roots of science fiction” and “Spiders and flies – the Gothic monsters of sci-fi horror,” explore the intersection of terror and horror tropes in what we can only call Gothic Science Fiction. This course is not about slick shiny optimistic visions of the future; it’s not about bold exploration conducted aboard pristine spaceships by intrepid explorers wearing silver jumpsuits with diagonal zippers. It’s not about scientific research that has vastly benefitted worlds and their inhabitants: it’s about bizarre singular passion projects and their progeny, about science gone wrong, about the byways of pseudoscience.

We will examine the theoretical bases of contemporary approaches to the Gothic as well as to Science Fiction and apply them to various examples of fiction and film. Core texts tentatively include Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 edition); Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Alien (dir. Ridley Scott), plus 1-2 other short novels and 1-2 other films (I will have the text list finalized by mid-June).

Evaluation will be based on a presentation and its revised report, a presentation response and its report; a term paper; a final reflection essay to be written during the exam period, and participation in discussion.

Keep checking my blog (https://blogs.ubc.ca/drgmbaxter/) for updates concerning texts and requirements.

Term 2

W, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

“Yes, I have read James Joyce’s Ulysses.” Let’s just admit this seminar is for a lifetime’s worth of bragging rights, but also because I know you will discover what fun it is to read and understand Joyce’s great book. It’s daunting, clever, about everything and nothing, completely frank, silly, shocking, obscene, intellectual, and really, really funny. Do you care about other people and enjoy their variety? Do you wonder about the universe? Do you like to try to make some sense out of a chaotic and often tragic world? Do you enjoy wordplay, puzzles, and games? Then Ulysses is for you! This is the book you’ll never forget reading… but it’s nice to have a guide along with you the first time you read it.

Term 1

R, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Reimagining Jane Eyre and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Why is Jane Eyre one of the most popular English novels ever written, inspiring successive generations of authors and artists of every description? How did Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland become a culture-text, a text that occupies such a prominent place in the popular imagination that it is collectively known and “remembered” even when the original work has never been read?

We will attempt to answer these and other questions of cultural production in our discussions of the novels and some of their adaptations and reimaginings. We will also explore the ideological assumptions—with respect to gender, race, class, sexuality, mental and physical ability, the environment, ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, etc.—implicit in the original works and in their reimaginings, and in our (and the Victorians’) readings of them.

Our discussions will be wide-ranging: from Jean Rhys’s famous Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea to Jackie Kay’s “Would Jane Eyre Come to the Information Desk?,” Cathy Marston and Errollyn Wallen’s dance film Bertha, and Patricia Park’s Re Jane (described by Park as “updating Jane Eyre to contemporary New York and the world of organic produce and identity politics”); from Walt Disney’s 1951 Alice in Wonderland, which continues to define Carroll’s novel in the popular imagination, to Salvador Dalí’s art edition, Tara Bryan’s tunnel book Down the Rabbit Hole, Elizabeth LaPensée and KC Oster’s graphic novel Rabbit Chase, and the “Alice industry.”

We will be discussing Jane Eyre in its entirety during our second (September 11th) class. Please begin reading before term begins.

Our reading and viewing list will include:

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World’s Classics); extracts from Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Canvas); Jane Eyre, devised by the Company and directed by Sally Cookson, 2015 (Drama Online, UBC Library); Jackie Kay, “Would Jane Eyre Come to the Information Desk?” (UBC Library and reading by Kay); Bertha, choreographed by Cathy Marston, music by Errollyn Wallen, 2021 (Joffrey Ballet); Patricia Park, Re Jane (Penguin); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview print edition, eBook); Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney, 1951 (UBC Library); Alice in Wonderland, directed by Jonathan Miller, 1966 (Canvas); Elizabeth LaPensée and K.C. Oster, Rabbit Chase (Annick Press).

Term 2

M, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

T, 2:30 PM - 4:30 PM

The Culinary Imagination: 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), Amitav Ghosh (The Nutmeg’s Curse), Sandra Gilbert (The Culinary Imagination) , 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). Tasteful excerpts from cookbooks by local artist Janice Wong and the local anthology edited by Brandy Lien Worrall-Soriano, Eating Stories: A Chinese Canadian and Aboriginal Potluck, will be sampled. Films will include Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast, Juzo Itami's Japanese "noodle western" Tampopo, Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman, the restaurant documentaries of Cheuk Kwan, and excerpts from the recent television series The Bear .

We will host some class dialogue with food writers and filmmakers, and students will be able to research local restaurants, gardens, or farms as optional final projects.

Multimedia examples of previous student projects for my food-themed courses can be found at the following Richmond Museum exhibit, “Our Journeys Here” (2017-2018)

Term 2

W, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Writing the Self

This seminar is organized around the theme of the self: Self-making, self-deception, self-reliance, self-expression, self-representation, self-liberation etc. 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 an early US philosopher (Emerson); lyric (self-expressive) poetry by Whitman and Dickinson; and life writing by a formerly enslaved woman (Jacobs) and the first Asian American author (Sui Sin Far). The course will wrap up with an experimental novel written by 13 contributors who together confront the American mythology of self-making and the idea of self-expression through voting OR a recent biography of five generations of a Chinese American family.

Texts may include:

  • Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1455539741 (available at bookstore or on amazon.ca) OR a print-out of the lyrics (on CANVAS)
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Experience”  on CANVAS
  • Selections from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself on CANVAS
  • Selections from Henry David Thoreau’s memoir, Walden (1854) (Princeton UP) 9780691169347
  • Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno (1852) in Billy Budd, Bartleby , and Other Stories ed. Peter Coviello (Penguin) ISBN 978-0143107606
  • Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) ed. Koritha Mitchell, Broadview P, ISBN 9781554815029
  • Selections from Sui Sin Far’s works on CANVAS (I will try to upload original PDF and a word doc)
  • Elizabeth Jordan’s ed. Composite novel The Sturdy Oak (1917) OR Ava Chin, Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming (2023)

 

Term 2

R, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Censorship and Speech in Contemporary Canadian Literature

“Artists have voices,” author Lawrence Hill states in an interview, “and their voices can help influence—profoundly, sometimes—the way we see ourselves, and the way we see our country and the world and our roles in them.” In this class we will turn to a series of questions I keep coming back to: Who speaks? Who gets a chance to speak? Whose voices are heard? Who listens? Who is listening? Who is silenced? Who chooses to be silent? Who profits from speaking? Who benefits? Thinking about censorship, freedom of speech, and creative activism, we will study a selection of fiction and poetry published in Canada that reflects on a wide range of topics and issues, including the climate crisis, race and racism, mobility and migration, decolonization, gender, sexuality, technology, and history. These writers tell stories where private lives and public histories often merge. We will examine the intersections of politics and art in texts from a range of geographies, genres, and cultures.  These might include a graphic novel “Haida Manga,” a book of poetry that reflects on the Rwandian genocide, a collection of short stories about a Laotian family new to Canada, a novel that time travels between the west coast of Canada and Japan, a narrative about the legacy of violence for a family in Ontario, and a novel about a friendship between a song writer and an internet cover artist.  This course will centre the voices of BIPOC writers.

Term 1

T, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Othello and Black Reimaginings

Of Shakespeare’s works, none has sparked the imagination, interest, and ire of Black people more than Othello. This seminar will begin with an intensive study of Othello, reading it within the context of early modern concerns about race, religion, gender, sexuality, and social rank. We will then examine how Black actors, authors, artists, and critics have reimagined Shakespeare’s play to advance their political, artistic, and intellectual projects. We will analyze landmark performances by Black actors (Ira Aldridge, Paul Robeson, and James Earl Jones), Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, Stew’s Passing Strange, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica, Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello, and work by the visual artists Fred Wilson, Curlee Raven Holton, and Chris Ofili. Class assignments will include short papers, a group-presentation, and a research-based final project.

 

Term 1

W, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Translation, Multilingualism, Poetics: Theory and Practice in Jewish and Muslim Diasporas

 

Above all else, my languages release me without losing me.   --–from Samira Negrouche, “Who is Speaking,” trans. Marilyn Hacker

In this senior seminar, we will explore the theory and practice of diasporic poetics and of literary translation. Contemporary literature and translation from the Jewish and Islamic diasporas, and in particular literature that weaves intimacies between traditions, will be our central but not solo focus. We will linger on translated and multilingual literature and on the experimental, erotic, political, queer, feminist, and strange. We will also look at sources: Qur’an, Talmud, medieval poetry, visual art. Assigned reading will likely include work by Rahat Kurd, Denis Ferhatovic, Joyce Mansour, Celia Dropkin, Marilyn Hacker, Samira Negrouche, Mohja Kahf, Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç, Jennifer Croft, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Lawrence Venuti, Jhumpa Lahiri, Suneela Mubayi, David Gramling, and others. Poets and translators will visit the classroom, and students will have the opportunity to practice poetic or prose translation for their final projects.

Term 1

R, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Postcolonial Literature

This course introduces students to the work of authors from formerly colonized nations in the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia. Focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on prose fiction, we will examine how postcolonial writers engage with issues of national identity and decolonization; negotiate the competing imperatives of English and vernacular literary traditions; and formulate both personal and collective strategies of self-representation. Possible writers include V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Conrad, Jamaica Kincaid, Ayi Kwei Armah, Titsi Dangarembga, and Wole Soyinka.

This is a reading intensive course, with approximately 200-250 pages of primary and secondary materials a week. Complete the readings before class and come prepared to discuss them with the group.

Required texts (on order at the UBC Bookstore): 

  • Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
  • Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
  • Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
  • V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River 
  • Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
  • J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life
  • Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
  • Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman
  • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Weep Not, Child

Term 2
T, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Scottish Romanticism

No country exudes the “Romantic” more than Scotland. Its gothic castles, sublime mountain ranges, and thrilling coastal vistas were all seminal to the formation of a Romantic mode in art, music, and literature. Scotland’s complex history—its divisions between Gaelic and English-speaking communities, its religious contentions and civil wars, its experiments with agricultural improvement and internal colonialism, even its status as a country (nation? region?)—was a subject of many works of poetry, drama, and fiction in the period and has been central to conversations about eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature ever since. In this seminar, we will consider these issues by way of a selection of key texts by canonical Scottish Romantic authors (James MacPherson, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, James Hogg) as well as by lesser known, but critically important writers, especially women (incl. Anne Grant, Joanna Baillie, Mary Brunton, and Susan Ferrier). Our goals will be to understand how Scotland helped to define the movement we call “Romanticism” and to see how Scottish Romantic literature unpacks in sometimes odd ways the formative social and political transformations that were taking place in Scotland and Great Britain at the time—transformations that still have repercussions today. We will also think about how Scottish Romanticism has influenced the aesthetics and politics of other nations, including Canada and particularly British Columbia.

Term 2

R, 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM

The Asian Inhuman

This course will examine the figure of the Asian as inhuman in contemporary literature and culture. It will draw on a body of creative and critical texts that address this figure in terms of techno-Orientalism; human rights discourse; race, migration and diaspora; gender and sexuality; migrant labour; and refugeeism.

Creative Texts: (Subject to Change)

  • Han Kang, The Vegetarian.
  • SKY Lee. Disappearing Moon Cafe.
  • Blaine Harden. Escape From Camp 14.
  • Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go.
  • Y-Dang Troeung. Landbridge.

There will also be a course packet with critical readings from critical refugee studies, critical Cold War studies, Asian diaspora and migration, on techno-Orientalism, and Asian Canadian and Asian American studies.

 

Term 2
Wednesday, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

British Drama Since 1956

Histories of post-WWII British drama often point to 1956 as a watershed year. The year marked the celebrated success of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a play which, in its examination and criticism of a post-war, class-ridden British society, recorded the frustration of the younger British generation (the so-called “angry young men”) with the traditional values of the “Establishment,” and signalled the beginning of a dramatic revival in Britain. The late 1950s initiated an explosion of dramatic activity that gave rise to the most exciting age of British drama since the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. A growing interest in international theatre, increased government funding, the growth of regional repertory theatre, and radical changes in the social structure of the nation all contributed to a revitalized theatrical environment during the 1960s and 1970s. And though later cutbacks in public funding under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher at times threatened their livelihood, British playwrights continued to address in vital and exciting ways many of the important and often contentious issues facing British society during and after Thatcherism. In this course, we will survey a cross-section of British drama since 1956, ranging from the plays of the angry young men and women (Osborne; Shelagh Delaney) to the work of such seminal playwrights as Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill to more recent attempts by playwrights such as Ayub Khan-Din, Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Martin McDonagh, and debbie tucker green to articulate new ways of exploring theatrical representation.

 

Term 2

F, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Twenty-First Century U.S. Fiction

This seminar will examine U.S. fiction (novels and short story collections) of the first twenty-plus years of the twenty-first century. Topics will include postmodernism and its putative end; new forms of experimentation such as autofiction; 9/11, its aftermath, and the U.S.’s place in geopolitics; and neoliberal economics as the dominant logic of contemporary capitalism. Students will write a seminar paper based in close-reading, a final research essay, and some online posts, as well as lead and participate in discussion. Texts will include the following (subject to change): David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion (2004) (selected stories); Toni Morrison’s Love (2003); Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013); Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) or A Gesture Life (1999); short stories by John Edgar Wideman; and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Some critical and theoretical texts will be included as well.

 

 

Teeth

Dallas Hunt

Pender Harbour: Harbour Publishing

2024

This is a book about grief, death and longing. It’s about the gristle that lodges itself deep into one’s gums, between incisors and canines.

Teeth details not only the symptoms of colonization, but also the foundational and constitutive asymmetries that allow for it to proliferate and reproduce itself. Dallas Hunt grapples with the material realities and imaginaries Indigenous communities face, as well as the pockets of livability that they inhabit just to survive. Still this collection seeks joy in the everyday, in the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples in the elsewhere, in worlds to come.

Nestling into the place between love and ruin, Teeth traces the collisions of love undone and being undone by love, where “the hope is to find an ocean nested in shoulders—to reside there when the tidal waves come. and then love names the ruin.”

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About the Author

Dallas Hunt

Dallas Hunt (Photo: Connor McNally)

Photo: Connor McNally

Dallas Hunt is Cree and a member of Wapsewsipi (Swan River First Nation) in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta, Canada. He has had creative and critical work published in the Malahat Review, Arc Poetry, Canadian Literature, and the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. His first children’s book, Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock, was published through Highwater Press in 2018, and was nominated for the Elizabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Canadian Picture Book Award. His teaching and research interests include Indigenous literatures, Indigenous theory & politics, Canadian Literature, speculative fiction, settler colonial studies, and environmental justice.

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The Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter: Anthropology Upside Down

Richard Cavell

Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press

2024

Edmund Snow Carpenter (1922-2011), shaped by an early encounter with Marshall McLuhan, was a renegade anthropologist who would plumb the connection between anthropology and media studies over a thoroughly unconventional career.

As co-conspirators in the founding of the legendary journal Explorations (1953-59), Carpenter and McLuhan established the groundwork for media studies. After ten years teaching anthropology at the University of Toronto, hosting radio and television shows on the CBC, and doing major research in the Arctic, Carpenter left Toronto and became an itinerant anthropologist. He took up a position in Papua New Guinea, where he countered anthropological practice by handing his camera to the Papuans. Carpenter’s marriage to the artist and heiress Adelaide de Menil made him a truly independent scholar. With the support of the Rock Foundation, founded by de Menil, he collected ethnographical art, curated exhibitions, and edited the materials for a twelve-volume study of social symbolism based on the massive archives created by Carl Schuster. Richard Cavell shows Carpenter – austere, generous, and unpredictable – to also be unwavering in working throughout his career within the framework established by Explorations.

The anthropological impetus for media studies has largely been forgotten. This study restores that memory, tracing Carpenter’s work in media and in anthropology over a lifetime of cultural achievements and intellectual convolutions.

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About the Author

Richard Cavell

Professor Richard Cavell’s research and supervisions are in media theory, with a special focus on Marshall McLuhan. He has published three books on McLuhan and maintains the website spectresofmcluhan.arts.ubc.ca.

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2024 Winter – Graduate

Winter 2024

Term 1
THURSDAY, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Required of all graduate students in the M.A. program. Pass/Fail.

This course will introduce new MA students in the Department of English Language and Literatures to graduate-level research skills and professional practices. Meetings will include a variety of guest presentations, workshops, and library visits. Sessions will focus on such topics as archival research, digital tools, applying for grants, writing seminar papers and conference proposals, and submitting articles for publications.

Term 1
THURSDAY, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Required of all graduate students in the PhD program. Pass/Fail.

Book History through the Collector’s Eye

Term 2
TUESDAY, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Recently, UBC Library’s department of Rare Books and Special Collections received a magnificent donation from a retired member of the English department, Professor Patricia Merivale, whose family had collected books for several generations. The collection, which begins in the first era of print and extends into the 20th century, is eclectic, but there are some themes that emerge, such as interest in fine bindings; in relatively obscure religious texts; in canonical literature; and in books that are just, well, valuable. This course will use the Merivale collection as the focus for a survey of the history of the book in the west. We will meet every week in RBSC for hands-on experience with selections from the Merivale collection, alongside relevant items from other parts of our collections. We will also think about what it means for a book to become part of a collection, considering how books move through the world; what motivates collectors; and how institutions reframe collections. Participants will have the opportunity to conduct original research on objects from the Merivale collection, which has never been the subject of sustained research before, and will produce public-facing work to present items from the collection to a general audience.

 

Digital Methods for Literary Study: Recovering Early Chinese Canadian Literature and History

Term 2
WEDNESDAY, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

This course is a course in Digital Humanities intended to develop students’ archival and digital research methods, which uses Early Chinese Canadian literature and history as a case study. We will pay particular attention to the lives and works of three early Chinese North American authors:

1) Edith Eaton (1865-1914), who, writing as “Sui Sin Far,” penned sympathetic fictional and journalistic portraits of diasporic Chinese in Montreal and cities in the eastern and western US during the Yellow Peril era. The author of Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), Eaton is credited with founding Asian North American literature. We will read scores of uncollected unsigned 1890s journalism by her about Montreal’s Chinatown, as well as autobiographical works about herself and her family;
2) Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve (1875-1954), Edith’s younger sister, who published bestselling novels set in Japan while assuming an offensive masquerade as Yokohama-born Japanese noblewoman “Onoto Watanna,” before abandoning this persona to lead Universal Studio’s screenwriting department, champion Canadian literature as President of Calgary’s branch of the Canadian Authors’ Association, found Alberta’s Little Theatre movement, and write moving realist fiction and journalism about life on the Canadian prairie. We will read her bestseller The Japanese Nightingale (1901), her realist novel Cattle (1923), some autobiographical works, her journalism about Hollywood, and the screenplay for one of her films; and
3) the Eaton sister’s Chinese-born mother Achuen “Grace” Amoy Eaton, acrobat, translator, missionary, and author of a newly recovered autobiographical serialized 1906 novella, Jade.

Readings will include:
• selections from Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton and other uncollected journalism by Edith Eaton
• Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale
• Winnifred Eaton’s Cattle
• Screenplay by Winnifred Eaton
• Grace Eaton’s Jade
• Jessica Marie Johnson, "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies,” Social Text 137 vol. 36, no. 4 (December 2018): 57-80.
• Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
• Amy Earhart, “What’s In and What’s Out? Digital Canon Cautions”. In Traces of the Old, Uses of the New.
• Selections from Lily Cho, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens.
• Selections from Nancy Rao, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America
Most classes will be a mix of discussion and hands-on digital research and writing, with support from cross-faculty digital initiatives and faculty in other disciplines who are leading adjacent DH projects.

Drawing on digitized newspapers, Head Tax records, and other digital and non-digital sources, students will build three projects using digital tools to share research about People, Places, and Texts:
1) A collectively researched but individually authored WordPress blog post with illustrations about a member of Montreal’s nascent Chinese community mentioned in Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far’s 1890s journalism + a CollectionBuilder digital archive of sources used in blog
2) a collectively built spreadsheet of venues and dates for the European tour of a 19th -century Chinese acrobatic troupe that included Eaton’s mother + a collectively built Storymap of that itinerary
3) a TEI-encoded digital edition of a 1920s screenplay by Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve + a 1000-word context essay + a 100-word peer-reviewed headnote, all of which may be featured on winnifredeatonarchive.org

Jewish Guilt

Term 2
FRIDAY, 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM

The well-worn phrase “Jewish guilt” has at least two meanings. It refers, on the one hand, to a style of self-abnegation and anxiety stereotypical of North American (Ashkenazi) Jewish culture. On the other, it denotes an array of historical anti-Jewish beliefs, including the destructive myths that Jews killed Christ, use Christian blood in their rituals, and/or were responsible for the Great Depression and other societal calamities. This wide-ranging course on literary Jews and Jewishness takes inspiration from this disturbing polysemy to investigate how Jewishness intersects with concepts of responsibility and transgression in a variety of literary forms. The course has three units, all linked by this strange thematic thread: a) the ancient destruction of Jerusalem in the medieval imagination; b) thebelle juive (Jewish beauty) and European colonialism; c) eroticism and survivorship in AIDS literature. (Note that the course engages broadly with diasporic Jewish cultures and literatures and avoids a reductive association of Judaism with the Holocaust and Zionism.) Possible primary readings include Josephus’s The Jewish Wars in medieval Latin, Ge’ez, and Hebrew reimaginings; David Reubeni, Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah; Ladino, Arabic, and Yiddish poetry; documents from the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora; short fiction by Jamaica Kincaid, Blume Lempel, Vitalis Danon, and Clarice Lispector; and novels by Sarah Schulman and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. All readings will be in English. The final assignment is a conference paper, which students will be able to submit to a graduate or other academic conference.

 

Indigenous Land Privatization and Literary Response

Term 1
WEDNESDAY, 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Settler colonial violence against Indigenous peoples takes place on many levels, most notoriously through overt slaughter and physical dispossession and relocation. One of the most common but least familiar to the general public, however, is through more bureaucratic and more ostensibly peaceful means, especially privatization mechanisms by which collective land holdings are broken into individual, fee simple landholdings that are more readily lost to coercive sale, tax seizure, eminent domain initiatives, and adverse possession (squatters’ rights) claims. This course will consider Indigenous land privatization not simply as policy but as focus of Indigenous literary response and theoretical concern. Primary readings may include writers such as William Apess, Lee Maracle, Maria Campbell, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Charles Red Corn, Andrea L. Rogers, and LeAnne Howe, with secondary works ranging across literary, historical, economic, and geographic concerns. The course will culminate in a public mini-conference organized by seminar participants.

Term 1
MONDAY, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Transfeminist Rhetorics

In an era replete with rising transantagonism among feminists, raging wildfires sparked by gender reveal parties, and increasing support for state/provincial/federal legislation that upholds a dymorphic model of sex/gender, it hardly seems like we have reached the “transgender tipping point” as proclaimed by the New York Times in 2014. Certainly, there is more trans representation in media than ever before: more trans characters, plot lines, actors, directors, producers, musicians, politicians, and social media influencers. Yet trans violence is also at an all time high: more TERFs, more fire, and more legislation, not to mention more homicides, more domestic violence, and more suicide. So if we really have reached a “tipping point,” is it really a point we want to have tipped?

This course introduces students to the field of Transfeminist Theory from a rhetorical angle, focusing on issues of legibility and security in light of the seemingly paradoxical situation within which many trans people now find themselves—one of heightened visibility but also heightened vulnerability. We will prioritize engaging works by and about disabled, Black, Indigenous, and other racialized trans and gender nonconforming people. We will also emphasize connections between our weekly readings and current events as they unfold in real (or recent) time. Assignments will include weekly reflections on the assigned readings, a short presentation, and a formal seminar paper. Readings will include canonical, controversial, and contemporary scholarship in transgender studies, offering students an overview of the field’s development from the 1960s to the present.

Theories of Rhetoric & Violence: A Worldly Survey

Term 2
TUESDAY, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

This course surveys rhetorical theories from across time and space that address and conceptualize the role of violence and coercion aimed at persuasion, influence, motivation, and faith. With a focus on the promotion and advocacy of violence, nonetheless some of the readings seek the avoidance of violence through both overt suppression and exploiting the paradoxes and antitheses that arise from thinking about war and peace (e.g. aggression and self-defense, order and chaos, etc). Course readings might include some combination of Guiguzi, Mozi, selections from “the seven Chinese military classics,” the Wen Tzu, The Gateless Gate, Daikaku’s Samurai Zen, the late shogunate samurai Yamaga Soko, Sutra of Golden Light, the 20th century propaganda theories of Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Mohamed Siad Barre, Kwame Nkrumah, Mao Tse Tung, and – in order to consider the complete suppression of violence, dissent, and activism - Kim Jong Il’s On Juche Literature.

Othello and its Afterlives

Term 1
TUESDAY, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

In “Letting Go of Othello,” Fred Moten writes, “Othello is an experiment in black personhood for which black persons are not responsible.” Moten’s analysis of what is arguably Shakespeare’s most famous “race play” speaks to contemporary concerns about the representation of Black people by non-Black artists, draws attention to the fact that Othello stages a white playwright’s fantasy of a Black hero, and suggests that Othello has created a certain burden for Black people. Drawing heavily from the work of Moten and other Black Studies scholars (such as bell hooks, Sylvia Wynter, Cedric Robinson, Christina Sharpe, and Sharon Patricia Holland), this seminar will delve deeply into Shakespeare’s Othello and its afterlives. We will consider early modern English constructions of race (both blackness and whiteness), especially as it intersects with religion, gender, sexuality, and social rank. We will then examine afterlives of the play, how later engagements with Othello (performances, visual culture, literary criticism, and adaptations) respond to, revise, reject, and/or redeploy the play’s configurations of race and power: Romantic responses to the play (Samuel Coleridge’s is infamous!), artistic representations of scenes from the play, the history of blackface performance, landmark performances by Black actors (Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson), Ishamel Reed’s Japanese by Spring, Carlyle Phillips’s The Nature of Blood, Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Rita Dove’s Sonata Mullatica, Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet, Stew’s Passing Strange, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Course assignments: 4 short response papers, a presentation, and a 6000-word seminar paper.

Exploring Jane Austen: Reading race, empire, settlement, and migration

Term 1
WEDNESDAY, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM

In January 2023, Kerry Sinanan and Marian Wassif issued a call for papers to be included in a volume they are editing on Jane Austen and whiteness for SUNY Press’s Long Nineteenth Century Series. Here is the volume’s mandate as the editors describe it: “The volume will show that it is specifically the making of Regency white people that has granted Austen her global, iconic status today.” Sinanan and Wassif are responding to several features of Austen criticism and Austen’s career: not only the recent online fandom of overt white supremacists who hold Austen’s protagonists up as examples of pure white “trad wife” womanhood but also recent contrasting work by Patricia Matthew and Devoney Looser arguing, respectively, that Austen’s novels reflect the vexed complexities of a Europe dependent on Atlantic chattel slavery and on goods and wealth produced by enslaved people and that Austen belonged to an overtly abolitionist family, whose politics must have inflected her novels; the classic statement by Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1992) that Austen’s work everywhere reveals Britain’s dependency on empire but failed to recognize or critique what it reveals; and Said’s major influence Raymond Williams, who remarked in The Country and the City (1973) that Austen did not merely turn her face away from enslavement and empire but “chose to ignore [all] the decisive historical events of her time.” This seminar will follow Matthew’s call for an approach to Austen that recognizes that “there are no literary moments or figures whose work is not responding to questions of liberation” while making room for consideration of the many ways such work might have responded and might have been understood as responding. The purpose of this seminar is therefore to allow its participants ample space, in a detailed investigation of the six finished novels plus the unfinished Sanditon, to consider such questions of liberation and the early nineteenth-century histories of race, empire, settlement, and migration from which they arise and to which they respond. In addition to Austen’s novels, readings will include criticism and theory by writers including Williams, Said, Fredric Jameson, Clifford Siskin, William Galperin, Edward Gikandi, Lisa Lowe, Emily Rohrbach, Mary Favret, Christina Sharpe, Orrin Wang, and Patricia Matthew, material drawn from Austen’s popular reception and canonization as discussed, in particular, by Janine Barchas and as represented in current online cultures, and contemporary writings on the histories of power and mobility in the Atlantic world of the early nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-Century Minds and Machines

Term 1
TUESDAY, 12:30 PM - 3:30 PM

The modern discipline of psychology developed during the nineteenth-century alongside new materialist understandings of the mind. In this seminar, we will consider how ideas on “the physical basis” of mind entered into the fiction of the period (and also how that fiction helped shape theories in the broader culture). Much like current worries about AI and chatbots generating writing and art, the specter of machines capable of thinking and even of producing creative works gave rise to anxieties and speculation in the Victorian period. The distinction between minds and machines was increasingly questioned. Was the mind a machine? Could machines become minds? New technologies of communication and recording also influenced conceptions of mind and literary representations of consciousness.

We will read fictions of virtual reality, of the technological transmission of thought, of mind swapping, and of machines that develop consciousness. But we will also look at less overt treatments of the relations between minds, bodies, and mechanisms in some realist fiction of the period. Topics discussed will include nineteenth-century depictions of intelligent machines; early attempts at artificial intelligence; emerging technologies and consciousness; theories of the unconscious, “aberrant” minds, gendered minds, scientific racism, and automata—both mechanical and human.

Readings will include:

  • Ambrose Bierce “Moxon’s Master”
  • Samuel Butler, “Book of the Machines”
  • Charles Dickens, “The Signal Man”
  • George Eliot, “Shadows of the Coming Race”
  • Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders
  • Rudyard Kipling, “Wireless”
  • Ada Lovelace, “Notes on the Analytical Engine”
  • Israel Zangwill, “The Memory Clearing House”
  • short fiction by Grant Allen, Edward Bellamy, Arthur Conan Doyle, Florence McLandburgh, H. G. Wells, and others

        From:

  • Long Bui, Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton
  • Louis Onuorah Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics
  • Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
  • Sally Shuttleworth and Jenny Bourne Taylor, Embodied Selves
  • Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, ed., Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time, and Intelligence

Assignments and Other Requirements:

  • Seminar paper (roughly 20 pages)
  • Presentation (roughly 25 minutes)
  • Three sets of informal questions/comments on the readings

Forms of Coexistence

Term 1
FRIDAY, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

What is a people? What is a nation? How does a people connect to "a" land? What comprises self-determination? In the first half of the twentieth century, nationalist conflict was rife, political borders were hardening and closing, refugees were everywhere, and human coexistence once again received global attention as an urgent concern. Some speculated that the world could or should become cosmopolitan, whether morally (taking on a commitment to mutual aid) or politically (to adopt some form of cooperation between nations, rather than devoting one’s powers to competition), while others took up the banner of the modern nation state as protection against the many problems of human coexistence.

This course proposes a nuanced and sensitive review of concepts, issues, and topics of human coexistence (with itself, and with the planet) formally at the level of theory (Fanon, Baldwin, Said, Levinas, Colebrook, Braidotti, Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe, et al.), as well as to explore its literary appearance as a problem in texts of modern life such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Woolf’s Between the Acts, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and Barnes’s Nightwood. Topics include alternative structures and methods for creatively articulating political interests, justice and rights discourse, thin and thick conceptions of international or world government, layered sovereignties, conflict resolution and reconciliation strategies, and the planet-wide imbrication of justicial, political, cultural, and economic formations and practices.

The Cold War in Asia: Asian American and Asian Canadian Responses

Term 2
FRIDAY, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM

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 capalist 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 explore the legacies of Cold War logics and the afterlife of the wars in Asia for Canadians and Americans by engaging with works of literature and theory. How do these contradictory memories and competing historical narratives shape how Asian diasporas in North America imagine themselves and are understood by non-Asians? How does what critic Jodi Kim calls the “protracted afterlife” of the Cold War continue to influence current conversations about migration, citizenship, and global events and politics? We will contextualize our discussions of these literary texts with critical and theoretical material and documentary films in order to think critically about these competing cultural representations and the narratives they produce.

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

Term 1
THURSDAY, 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

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 Americana (1971), The Names (1982), and Libra (1988); 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.

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, David Cowart, John McClure, Mark McGurl, Chris Lee, Lavinia Delois Jennings, Kenneth Warren, John K. Young, Amy Hungerford, and others.

Canadian Literature and the 2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Term 2
MONDAY, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

When the Scotiabank Giller Prize was created in 1994, the award’s founder decided that “cultural, political, and regional factors would be wilfully shunned.” The “only criterion was to pick the best book.”  What, however, is the “best”? This is a question that has long plagued literary studies, alongside the problematic concept of ‘great books.’  The fraught answer relies on aesthetic evaluation, critical taste and expectation, and subjective notions of literary value. It also changes over time and across space. And, why “shun” cultural, political and regional factors? What is lost? What is gained?

In this seminar, the 2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize will serve as a case study for the critical examination of both literary prize culture and contemporary literary history in Canada. Together, we will study the works of fiction shortlisted for the 2024 Prize and situate the work in the larger context of the heated cultural debates of the past decade. Both writers and critics in the Canadian literary community have been occupied with discussions of the asymmetrical distribution of power in the literary establishment, asked whose voices are heard, questioned what kinds of books are lauded, queried who has access to publication and subsequent reviews, and considered those who have refused to accept the status quo.  The ongoing discussions about inclusion and exclusion have been situated within significant critical conversations about settler colonialism, critical race studies, and generic expectation in the study of Canadian literature. In this class, we will examine the relationship between these critical conversations and the most lucrative prize in Canadian letters. We will ask: what influence do literary prizes have in developing audience taste? What are the benefits of prizes for authors and the literary community? Sales of shortlisted books increase by approximately 500%  (“The Giller Effect”). What does such material support and exposure mean for writers? What about the issues raised by increased corporate sponsorship in a time of waning government support of the arts?  So many questions! We will consider the ongoing debates as we critically assess the culture and politics of awards systems in Canada. In this class, in addition to studying the shortlisted books for 2024, we will read critical and theoretical works by Lorraine York, Gillian Roberts, James English, Erin Wunker, Julie Rak, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Joshua Whitehead, Kai Cheng Thom, Sarah Brouillette, Pierre Bourdieu, and Walter Benjamin, among others.

We will also have the opportunity to look behind-the-scenes at the Scotiabank Giller Prize for 2024 and meet with some of the shortlisted authors, jury members, and publishers. While much of the reading list for this class won’t be available until the 2024 shortlist is announced, books by MG. Vassanji, Esi Edugyan, Alice Munro, Vincent Lam, Omar El Akkad, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Madeleine Thien, Michael Ondaatje, André Alexis, Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry, Suzette Mayr, Ian Williams, and Sarah Bernstein have all won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in the past and students will be asked to research a prize-winning book from this list in addition to the 2024 list in the context of class discussions.

Fictions of London

Term 1
MONDAY, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

“Neither of us are 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.

Our primary texts might include works by Sam Selvon, Colin MacInnes, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Derek Jarman, Hanif Kureishi, Patrick Keiller, Gilbert & George, Monica Ali, and Zadie Smith. Secondary readings might include writings by Iain Sinclair, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Stuart Hall, John McLeod, Edward Soja, and others.

Bodies: Person, Flesh, Thing

Term 1
FRIDAY, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

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 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; Jean Amery’s memoir At the Mind’s Limits; James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk; Susan Brison’s Aftermath; Andrea Long Chu’s Females; and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. 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 A Body, Undone, Cristina Crosby’s memoir of her disability. Critical and theoretical excerpts will be drawn from the work of Michael Foucault, Hortense Spillers, Didier Fassin, Elizabeth Hinton, and Jay Bernstein. Requirements: regular attendance and participation; Canvas posts; a 5-page book review; and a 15-page research essay.

Term 2
THURSDAY, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 553-002 is not yet available. Please check again shortly.

Term 2
THURSDAY, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 553-003 is not yet available. Please check again shortly.

Photo-textualities: Writing in the Age of the Camera

Term 2
THURSDAY, 1:30 PM - 4:30 pM

“The most obvious thing about words and pictures is that they routinely appear together, and even the simplest joint appearances—words supplying credit lines or captions, pictures supplying illustrations—suggest how each art works, how the shown is never exactly the same as the spoken.” (Jefferson Hunter, from Image and the Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photographs and Texts)

This course will examine the influence of photography and cinema on literary form. Photography has become such a common aspect of contemporary life that camera technology is now regularly built into smart phones, tablets, desktop and laptop computers, and automobiles. The photographic recording of everyday life provides an unprecedented archive of visual memories. Photographic ways of seeing exert complex and contradictory effects on life: the camera both records and distorts, and it is a tool for both those who expose social injustice and those who seek to invade the privacy of the citizen and to place others under the power of surveillance. Susan Sontag, in On Photography, alerts us to the “peremptory rights [of the photographer] to interfere with, to invade, or ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions” (11). The judgments of the invasive camera eye have, as Sontag states, shaped subjective assessment: "We learn to see ourselves photographically: to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely to judge that one would look good in a photograph” (85).

We will explore some of the following central questions: Given the increasing power of photographs and cinematography in the formation of private and public judgments, how have novelists, poets, dramatists, and film makers responded to these visual influences? What happens to the articulation of the written self when it confronts the power of photography? What kinds of critical strategies have writers adopted to resist the invasive influences of photography and visual culture? How have writers incorporated some of the techniques of photographic and cinematic ways of seeing into their forms of writing?

We will think carefully about the dynamic relationships between literary texts and the modes of visualization peculiar to photography and cinema. We will review the pre-history of literary representations of photography through the rhetorical concept of ekphrasis, or the representation of painting or sculpture in literary forms, and the historic impact of such developments as the daguerreotype, portable personal cameras, motion picture photography, and videography. We will also consider uses of photography as an instrument of colonial control, through passports and immigration documents such as the Chinese Canadian Head Tax, and the effects of what Lily Cho has deemed “Mass Capture,” and through the mass scales of visual surveillance theorized by John Tagg.

Readings will include Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, essays by Walter Benjamin, and selections from Susan Sontag's On Photography, Kyo Maclear's Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki, and the Art of Witness, John Tagg’s The Disciplinary Frame, and Lily Cho’s Mass Capture: Chinese Canadian Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens. We will also consider works of fiction, drama, poetry, and cinema that respond to our increasingly visual culture such as Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, Le Thi Diem Thuy's The Gangster We are All Looking For, Marie Clement's The Edward Curtis Project, Roy Miki's Mannequin Rising, and films by Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window), Michaelangelo Antonioni, (Blow-up), and Christopher Nolan (Memento).

Each seminar meeting will usually include both the discussion of an assigned literary work and a theoretical or critical essay.

Course requirements:

1) Weekly participation in the discussion of readings, topics, and questions: 15%

2) One oral presentation (15 minutes) on a primary text and critical context: 10%

3) One short critical meditation on a core concept situated in theories of photography and literature: 15%

4) One final essay (3500-4000 words, or 14-16 pages, excluding bibliography), that could emerge from a revised version of your seminar presentation, or which pursues your particular research interests on a relevant question: 60%

Decolonizing Technoscience

Term 1
TUESDAY, 3:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Structural relations between colonial power and scientific knowledge production have shaped political and cultural life since the nineteenth century. Objectivity, facts, experiment, and the scientific method gained global authority and political power at a time when European powers dominated much of the non-western world. Even as decolonization, anti-imperial movements, and neoliberalism variously shifted global political relations over the next two centuries, scientific objectivity was often believed to be neutral, and held up as aspirational for developing nations. Today, activist and scholarly calls to decolonize knowledge force us to critique and rethink the relationship between technoscientific practice and political power. Histories of empire, decolonization, and development have come into conversation with the history, philosophy, and anthropology of science and technology. This course offers a graduate-level introduction to these conversations, via writing in colonial history, development studies, informatics, feminist science studies, and science fiction. Through widely interdisciplinary reading, we will seek to understand the significance of the “decolonizing turn” in technical practice and scientific knowledge production. Students from all disciplinary backgrounds are welcome to bring a critical, open, engaged perspective. Readings include Marx, Foucault, Kuhn, Haraway, Virginia Eubanks, Safiya Noble, Lorraine Daston, and more.

Early Modern Energies

Term 2
THURSDAY, 2:30 PM - 5:30 PM

This seminar will be coordinated with a research project called “Energy Transitions in Long Modernity” (https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FY007166%2F1). In our seminar, we shall survey the broad field of the Energy Humanities before narrowing focus on histories and representations of energy sources in the long seventeenth century. Research nodes will include the early modern history of renewables (sun, wind, water) and technologies associated with capturing them; the uneven transition from wood to coal, as well as the use of peat; and, the extraction of labor from a range of bodies, including animals, servants, and enslaved persons. We’ll read scholarly texts from across the disciplines (History, Comparative Literary Studies, Art History) and host a series of guest speakers representing them. Our literary texts will include mainstays in the utopian tradition (Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Francia Bacon, and Francis Godwin) and fictional and literary accounts of global empire (Theodore de Bry, Richard Hakluyt, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift). Each student will lead an hour of seminar, submit weekly responses, and complete a final writing assignment.