2017 Summer

Term 1
Mon & Wed, 12:00 - 3:00 p.m.

There is currently no description available for this section of ENGL 110. Please contact the instructor.

Term 1
Mon & Wed, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

Students in this course will read a romantic tragedy (Romeo and Juliet), a romantic comedy (Pride and Prejudice) and a story of survival (Into Thin Air: Jon Krakauer’s non-fiction account of 1996 Mount Everest disaster that killed nine climbers). There will also be a selection of poetry.  The readings are relatively brief and commensurate with what the human brain can absorb during six short weeks of warm and sunny weather. Owing to the brevity of the Summer Semester term, the course will focus on fewer texts, but will attempt to cover them in greater depth.

The course requires all students to make a single group presentation, valued at 20 %.

The purpose of the course is to introduce students to some of the skills of literary study, including the techniques of close reading.  There will be two marked in-class close-reading poetry assignments, one near the beginning of the course and one near the end.

Any student who wishes to take this course needs to attend the very first class.

Texts

• Shakespeare, William.  Romeo and Juliet.
• Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice.
• Krakauer, Jon.  Into Thin Air.
• Custom course package containing poetry.

Evaluation

• Attendance and participation - 5 %
• Group presentation - 20 %
• In class assignment - 20 %
• In-class close reading exercise - 10 %
• At-home essay (1,000 words) - 25 %
• Final exam - 20 %

Approaches to Literature
Term 1
Tue & Thu, 12:00 - 3:00 p.m.

For this section of the course we''ll be reading two contemporary novels by Canadian authors (titles TBA), two plays by British and American authors (ditto), and a selection of thematically interrelated poetry from Canada, the US, and the UK.

In view of the brevity of the six-week summer semester, the course instructor highly recommends reading at least one - and preferably two - of the course texts before Day 1. These include two novels (George and Rue, This Location of Unknown Possibilities) and two plays (Fences, The Importance of Being Earnest)

Term 1
Tue & Thu, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

There is currently no description available for this section of ENGL 110. Please contact the instructor.

Term 1
Wed & Fri, 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

There is currently no description available for this section of ENGL 110. Please contact the instructor.

Approaches to Literature
Term 2
Mon & Wed, 12:00 - 3:00 p.m.

The renowned writer of weird fiction H.P. Lovecraft famously claimed that “the true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule” – rather “a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present.” This section of English 110 will consider drama, poetry, and prose fiction that meets these criteria: stories of monsters, demons, unfathomable horrors, metaphysical mystery, and cosmic awe. We will examine the ways that “weird” literature evokes emotions of wonder, fear, and disgust while engaging with political, social, and philosophical questions, interrogating boundaries, norms, and categories. Beginning with the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, a blood-soaked tale of monster-hunting in a world governed by a cruel, inhuman fate or “wyrd,” we will trace the literary history of the weird, following it first through the otherworldly Wales of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the fallen, omen-haunted tragedy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. After the weird wakes from the rationalist nap of Enlightenment we turn to the Romantic poetry of Blake and Coleridge, and then press on to Christina Rossetti’s sensuously malevolent “Goblin Market” and Sheridan le Fanu’s erotic vampire story “Carmilla.” The course concludes with a consideration of early twentieth-century weird fiction, including the short stories of Lovecraft, and with China Miéville’s “New Weird” novel The City & The City.

Term 2
Mon & Wed, 12:00 - 3:00 p.m.

There is currently no description available for this section of ENGL 110. Please contact the instructor.

Approaches to Literature
Term 2
Tue & Thu, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

This section of English 110 will introduce students to basic elements of university-level literary study by examining a wide range of works in three genres: poetry, prose fiction, and drama.  These works are of various literary eras and by authors from diverse cultural backgrounds; a few were not originally written in English. Students will be taught methods of literary analysis that should enable them to read each work with care, appreciation, and (one hopes) enjoyment.

Assignments:

• Two in-class essays, each worth 20%
• One home essay (1000 words), worth 30%
• Final exam, worth 30%

Text: Kelly J. Mays, The Norton Introduction to Literature, Portable Twelfth Edition (W.W. Norton, 2016)

Tentative reading list

Poems: William Shakespeare, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”; William Blake, “The Tyger”; Christina Rossetti, “In an Artist’s Studio”; Emily Dickinson, “She dealt her pretty words like Blades—”; Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz”; Adrienne Rich, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”; Margaret Atwood, “Death of a Young Son by Drowning”; Li-Young Lee, “Persimmons”; Amit Majmudar, “Dothead”

Short stories: Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”; Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”; Gabriel Garcia Márquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”; Toni Morrison, “Recitatif”; Jamaica Kincaid, “Girl”; Amy Tan, “A Pair of Tickets”; Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies”

Plays: William Shakespeare, Hamlet; Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House

Literature in English to the 18th Century
Term 1
MW, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

This course focuses on selected English writers of poetry, drama, and prose from the late 14th to

the early 18th centuries.  The following literature will be studied: The General Prologue in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; poems by John Donne; selections from John Milton’s Paradise Lost; Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; Part 4 of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  Class discussion of each work will sometimes focus on its treatment of social, political, and economic issues of the period in which it was written: for instance, the alleged corruption of the late-medieval Church and the questioning of conventional gender roles in the early modern period.

Course requirements:

Quiz #1 - 20%
Quiz #2 - 20%
Home essay; 1500 words - 30%
Final examination - 30%

Text:

Joseph Black et al., eds., The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Concise Edition, Volume A, Third Edition (The Medieval Period, The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century, The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century)

Literature in English to the 18th Century
Term 2
MW, 12:00 - 3:00 p.m.
email: Kim.Trainor@ubc.ca
office: Buchanan Tower 421

This survey will concentrate on expressions of sacred and secular love and desire in the medieval and early modern periods. Texts we'll study include "Caedmon's Hymn;" "The Wife's Lament;" the writings of the mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; poems from Donne's Songs and Sonets and Elegies; Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. As a case study in form, we'll trace the evolution and scope of the sonnet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Wroth, Milton).

We'll also acquire a technical knowledge of the mechanics of poetry: metre and rhythm, syntax and line, diction, metaphor, rhetoric. We'll approach these poems and plays from the perspective of working poets—as if we were writing them. For your term paper you'll have the option to write your own sonnet.

Required Texts:

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Major Authors Vol. A. The Middle Ages through the Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. General Ed. Stephen Greenblatt
• Twelfth Night, Oxford UP

World Literature in English
Term 1
TTh, 12:00 - 3:00 p.m.

“Strange how unimportant eyebrows can be, so long as there are two of them”: Place, the Other, and Cognitive Schema in Homemaking

"Is it possible to imagine being named by a place? And – were we to contemplate such a thing – how would we come to merit that honour?" – Don McKay, The Muskwa Assemblage

 “We live by stories, we also live in them.  One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves.  We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness.  If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.” – Nigerian storyteller, Ben Okri

“Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within.
Haunted by tribal memories, I know
This little now, this accidental present
Is not the all of me, whose long making
Is so much of the past.”   – Oodergoo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker), “The Past”

“Strange how unimportant eyebrows can be, so long as there are two of them,” says the omniscient narrator about Gemmy in Remembering Babylon, perhaps arguing for how obvious or natural conformity of behavior and visual similarity are to belonging.  The claim also incites an examination of the mechanisms, criteria and actions by which we do belong or feel at home.  We’ll investigate three core texts (Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, and Shaun Tan’s The Arrival) – set in the post-colonial/post-empire countries of Sri Lanka, Australia, and an imaginary New York, respectively – and two short stories and a selection of poetry.  We’ll discuss the role of outsiders (or ‘the other’), place, and cognitive schema in homemaking, modes of belonging and versions of home, and more importantly, come to some understandings of how the ideas of Empire – difference, the unknown, human-centric place, race (among others) – inform, condition, and construct place-specific belonging today, both in Vancouver and the places you call home. We’ll watch the Masterpiece Theater production of Andrea Levy’s Small Island too.

Canadian Literature
Term A
Offered Online

This section of ENGL 222 is offered online. Click here  to view full description.

Studies in the Victorian Period
Term 2
Tue & Fri, 11:00 a.m.

In this seminar, we will explore Victorian fiction’s fascination with the uncanny, the occult, the monstrous, and extraordinary visions of the future. In recent years, scholars have come to appreciate that the non-realist fiction that was once critically undervalued is central to the literary culture of the period. The major writers of the age wrote supernatural and Gothic works, and the genres of ghost, occult horror, and science fiction fully emerged in the period. The revaluation of this fiction has been driven largely by a shift toward interdisciplinary modes of literary criticism: the Victorian fantastic draws on scientific, psychological, and biomedical ideas that emerged in and transformed nineteenth-century culture. The literary texts we will read speculate on the nature of the body, the powers of the mind, the finality of death, the impact of new technologies, and the shape of the future. We will encounter ghost-seers, mind-readers, shape shifters, and automatons. Examining the fiction’s literary and cultural contexts, we will discuss such topics as evolutionary and degeneration theories, entropy, mental causation at a distance, gendered and colonial bodies, contagion theories, and the Urban Gothic. We will also look at some theoretical and critical texts that consider the relations between the literary texts and the non-literary discourses that informed them. Our readings will extend from the mid-Victorian age through the fin de siècle, ending with a taste of early Modernism.

 Assignments and Other Requirements

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

Texts will include:

• Charles Dickens, “The Signalman”
• George Eliot, The Lifted Veil
• Thomas Hardy, “The Withered Arm”
• Somerset Maugham, The Magician
• Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Stories (ghost, fantastic, weird, and science fiction) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Arthur Conan Doyle, J. S. Le Fanu, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, May Sinclair, and others.

Topics in Science and Technology
Term 1
Tue & Thu 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

Over the past decade, theory has shifted from a concern with discourse and language analysis to interpretive systems which incorporate the vibrant material, actant object, and articulate nonhuman. For example, assemblage theory, drawing from Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Latour, DeLanda, and others, claims to offer a new frame for articulating contingent, ephemeral, and complex dynamic schemata, functions, or exchanges, transcending a unitary realm of totality and difference. At the same time, some ideations which predate (and perhaps prefigure) the current period seem to have successfully transferred to the new context. Judith Butler’s performativity, once conceived as discursive (e.g., “citational”), now in her recent book (Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, HUP 2015) approaches an emergent agencement self-organized from within heterogenous groupings. As well, Karen Barad has theorized that through an “agential realist account, all bodies, not merely human bodies, come to matter through the world’s performativity—its iterative intra-activity” (Qui Parle 19.2, 125. Also see Meeting the Universe Halfway and “Posthumanist Performativity”). Here she examines phenomena such as the “nonlocal communication” between ground and lightning and the queerness of atoms’ materializing entanglements.

This course explores recent work in new materialisms, with a focus on those which are distinctively fluid, relational, or performative. It queries the matterings, discontinuities and contradictions among a new generation of theorists who aim to understand a more lively version of materiality. This rich competition among materializing systems accounts opens wide critical spaces around questions of coding and territoriality, assembly, expression, and scale.

Some proposed readings:

• Deleuze and Guattari, 1000 Plateaus
• Foucault, “Security, territory, population” et al.
• Latour, Reassembling the Social
• Butler, Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
• Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual
• Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely
• Miguel DeLanda, from A New Philosophy of Society, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, War in an Age of Intelligent Machines, “Deleuze and the Social”
• Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect
• Karen Barad, “Posthuman Performativity,” Meeting the Universe Halfway
• Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
• More doubtfully: some writings in object oriented ontology