As of May 15, 2025
Learn more about the Ways of Knowing degree requirement for students entering the BA degree program. 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
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MWF, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
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 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, 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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
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, Robot; The Lifecycle of Software Objects; The 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
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
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):
- Dollinger, Stefan. 2019. Creating Canadian English: The Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English. Cambridge University Press.
- Walker, James A. 2015. Canadian English: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. London: Routledge.
Term 2
MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
*This course fulfills the new BA Ways of Knowing: Place and Power breadth requirement
The description for this course is not yet available.
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, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Speculative Fiction: Talking to Tolkien
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
TTh, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
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
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 1
TTh, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
Online Asynchronous
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Hybrid Mode
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
MW, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
Online with Zoom meetings set by instructor
Thursdays, 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
TTh, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
The Arthur of the Britons
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 description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
TTh, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
Online Asynchronous
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 1
TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:00 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
The description for this course is not yet available.
400-Level Courses
Term 1
T, 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
W, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
R, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
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 description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
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
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 1
R, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.
Term 2
T, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
The Shelleys; or, The Function of Romanticism at the Present Time
The period between 1812 and 1826 was not dissimilar to our own: a global war came to end, leaving death, disease, and dispossession in its wake; the world economy was wracked by fiscal insecurity and trade embargoes; inequality and enslavement were rampant, in spite of general assurances of “liberty”; people were transfixed by new technologies and new media. The period also saw the flowering of artistic movements and scientific disciplines catering to the burgeoning intellectual curiosity of an educated middle class. Few writers can claim to represent the “spirit of the [Romantic] age” better than Mary and Percy Shelley. They had a vast array of interests—sex, science, philosophy, religion, history, politics, gender, ecology, race—and in their literary works they conceived all of these operating simultaneously in literary worlds like but also not their own. Consequently, as literary fashions have waxed and waned, they have rarely been out of either the entertainment or the academic spotlight. Mary’s first novel, Frankenstein, is a defining work of science, horror, and fantasy fiction, while the concluding sentence of Percy’s “Defence of Poetry,”—“poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—is the underlying manifesto of English studies.
This seminar offers a deep dive into the Shelleys’ career and influence by way of a selection of his poems, plays, and lyrics, and her stories and novels, including Frankenstein (1818), Valperga (1823), and The Last Man (1826) as well as their few but significant collaborative efforts. We will use the Shelleys’ writings primarily to think about how Romantic literature encompasses various genres, media, ideas, and disciplines to imagine a faithful representation of the world people know and a hopeful vision of the world they want. We will place this mandate in its historical context, occasionally dipping into other disciplines as students’ curiosities require. The extent of the Shelleys’ ongoing influence also provides an opportunity to think further about how “English Literature” today, as subject and profession, one that sees itself as a rival to the University of which it is also a part, is a product of the Romanticism that the Shelleys advocated. We will thus consider how the Shelleys have inspired critics since the Romantic period to articulate various mandates for literary criticism by reading some key texts in their critical genealogy and comparing those to their and our concerns. What, in other words, does it mean to read the Shelleys now? What is the function of their Romanticism at the present time?
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
Term 2
F, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.