2018 Winter

An Introduction to English Honours
Terms 1 and 2
MWF, 10:00 - 11:00 AM

Term 1: English literature has deep cultural roots, and we’ll spend Term 1 exploring how English-speaking peoples and their forebears used their voices to share their stories and make their worlds.  From the Angles and Saxons through the Norman Middle Ages, to Elizabethan England and the traumas of the Reformation and the Revolution, we’ll study how literary works made, and reflect on, the social networks of earlier eras.  We’ll have a rare-books field-trip and a colonialism film festival during Term 1.

Term 2: English literature’s social networks are most clearly manifest in specific genres as they change and adapt to (and influence) the cultures in which they emerge.  This term we’ll study poetry, fiction, and film in three main arcs, all asking how literature and the social sphere intertwine and influence each other.  We’ll start with poetry, seen three ways; we’ll move to fiction, early, modern, and contemporary, that tackles racialization and colonialism, and we’ll end with the work of indigenous filmmakers talking back.

Each term we’ll learn together through student-led seminars on special topics and writing and library workshops.

Seminar for English Honours
Term 2
M, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.; W, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

This course introduces students entering the English Honours Program to the major currents of literary theory commonly used in English studies today. We will review a range of primary theoretical writings representing the schools and movements that have had the strongest influence on recent literary criticism: psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, queer theory, postcolonial and race theory, and ecocriticism. We will also examine the way that these theories have been adapted to English literary studies by reading a selection of criticism on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Evaluation will be based on contributions to ongoing discussions, a series of short reflective essays, a presentation and report, and a substantial research paper.

Literature in English to the 18th Century
Term 1
MWF, 12:00 - 1:00 PM

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 her 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 endlessly controversial and nebulous concept that deals with the authority to make decisions and laws. In this course, we will investigate major texts and themes of medieval (6^th-15^th centuries) and early modern (15^th-17^th centuries) British literature, with a particular focus on how this literature—from Latin chronicles to Old English poetry to seventeenth-century drama—addresses the problem of sovereignty. Students will learn to close-read, to turn a close reading into an argumentative essay, and to understand and use the tools of literary study. Major texts will include Beowulf, Marlowe’s Edward II, and a Shakespeare play.

Literature in English to the 18th Century
Term 1
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

This course will introduce you to the wondrous worlds of medieval and early-modern Literature in English. Ranging across 1000 years of creative cultural production, we will examine how the writers of medieval and early-modern culture imagined themselves and the environment in which they lived. We will read texts as diverse and varied as Anglo-Saxon Epic poetry, Chivalric adventure narratives, Chaucerian comedy, medieval travel narratives, and the existential drama of Marlowe.  Students will leave the course both well-versed in the historical heritage of English literature and well-practiced in cutting-edge critical techniques.

Literature in English to the 18th Century
Term 1
MWF, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

This course is a survey of English Literature from medieval times through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to the beginning of the Romantic period and the rise of the English novel.  In part, it will be a study of successive changes in English society and culture, and accompanying changes in literary form and focus. We will consider, among other things, patterns of continuity, influence, innovation and revolt.  The course is intended to provide students with a range of scholarly and critical tools for the study of literary and other texts, and a substantial knowledge of a wide range of literature.  Students will learn to employ strategies of close reading, library research, and textual analysis supported by reasoned argument, and we will explore some aspects of critical theory in relation to specific texts. Students will engage in lively discussion in class, and be encouraged to evolve their own ideas, and to defend them effectively.  Our focus will include the political and cultural history relevant to particular works, including matters of religious, philosophical, aesthetic and social importance.  We will also investigate ideas concerning class, nationality, and gender identity current in these centuries.  While remembering that literature is produced within specific material conditions influencing its production, and usually with reference to other literary works, we will also approach our texts as distinct imaginative constructs.

Texts: The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Major Authors, Vol. 1, 9^th Edition; Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra; Jane Austen, Persuasion. 

Please note that both non-anthologized texts are available at free online sites:   

• Antony and Cleopatra:  shakespeare.mit.edu/cleopatra/full.htm
• Persuasion:  www.gutenberg.org

However, the hard copy texts I order for you will have accompanying introductions and notes which will be invaluable as study guides.

Readings: Geoffrey Chaucer, “General Prologue” and “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale”; Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra; John Donne (selected poems); Margaret Cavendish, “The Hunting of the Hare”; John Milton, selections from Paradise Lost, Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man”; Samuel Johnson, “A Brief to Free A Slave”; William Blake, selections from The Songs of Innocence and Experience and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Christabel”, Jane Austen, Persuasion.

Course Requirements: one in-class essay (30%), one term paper involving library research and a formal bibliography (40%), and a final exam (30%). Additional supplementary marks for class participation may be awarded at the discretion of the instructor.

Literature in English to the 18th Century
Term 1
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

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 Macbeth; 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%

Texts: Joseph Black et al., eds., The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Concise Edition, Volume A (The Medieval Period, The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century, The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century), Third Edition; William Shakespeare, Macbeth (Signet Classic)

Literature in English to the 18th Century
Term 2
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 220 is not yet available. Please contact the instructor directly.

Literature in English to the 18th Century
Term 2
MWF, 1:00 - 2:00 PM

This course reimagines the standard historical survey of early British literature – which is, really, in its strongest form, a survey of lyric and narrative poetry – as instead a course on the progress and production of early theatre. We will attend to theatre’s multiple genres and track how medieval theatre influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries and heirs. We’ll focus on a range of performance venues, which included the church, the city’s streets, the commercial stages, the monarch’s court, and the private reading chamber. And we’ll be especially interested in what early British theatre has to tell us about the histories of gender, race, religion, and social class.

There will be 2 short papers (40%), a midterm (20%), and a final exam (30%). The remainder of your course mark (10%) will be determined by attendance and class participation.

Literature in English to the 18th Century
Term 2
TTh, 12:30 - 2:00 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 220 is not yet available. Please contact the instructor directly.

Literature in Britain: the 18th Century to the Present
Term 1
MWF, 2:00  - 3:00 PM

This course surveys British Literature from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first 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. WARNING: THIS COURSE CONTAINS MATERIAL THAT SOME MAY FIND OFFENSIVE.

Literature in Britain: the 18th Century to the Present
Term 1
TTh, 2:00 - 3:30 PM

This course will explore late Eighteenth-Century through early Twentieth-Century British literature, and introduce you to some of the major authors and literary movements of the periods. Our readings will cluster around several themes: ghosts, science, and new technologies. We will also consider the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts of the fiction, discussing such topics as psychology, gender, and imperialism. Texts will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brönte’s Wuthering Heights, and H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds.

Literature in Britain: the 18th Century to the Present
Term 2
MWF, 12:00  - 1:00 PM

English 221 surveys British poetry, drama, fiction and non-fictional prose from the 18^th century to the present. This section spans the upheaval of the Revolution in France (1789) to the destruction of the World Trade Center in the United States (2001). We will read a broad array of texts from The Longman Anthology of British Literature, namely Volume 2A (The Romantics and their Contemporaries); Volume 2B (The Victorian Age); and Volume 2C (The Twentieth Century and Beyond). Writers ranging from Edmund Burke to Zadie Smith illuminate shifts in class hierarchies, (post)colonial bonds, gender norms and regional environments, enabling us to observe continuities and differences in linguistic conventions, literary genres, thematic preoccupations and rhetorical techniques. By situating British literature in its historical contexts, we will analyze the dynamic interrelationships between cultural tradition and social change, extending to the reinterpretations afforded by selected adaptations, documentaries and performances. Throughout, students will cultivate spoken and written skills in literary criticism through close engagement with texts as they also compare and contrast forms, issues and styles across historical periods. The course requirements include participation; a midterm; an essay; and a final examination.

Literature in Britain: the 18th Century to the Present
Term 2
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Why do we tell stories? The very phrase “telling stories” is synonymous, to quote the Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, with saying “the thing which is not.” Yet most story-tellers are trying to articulate “the thing which is,” however they might define that in socio-political and/or aesthetic terms. In this course we will explore the nature and significance of the stories that we tell—and have told for the past 200 years—as writers, readers, and critics. What ideological assumptions with respect to aesthetics, ethics, gender, class, race, sexuality, religion, politics, education, etc., underlie our readings of literature and the numerous critical and theoretical approaches to literary interpretation? What difference does it make if the “source texts” for a story are actual historical events? What does the popularization and commodification of literary works, such as the re-visioning of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in every medium, tell us about the works themselves, the societies that produced them, our own society, and ourselves?

Our authors: George Gordon, Lord Byron; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Charles Dickens; Christina Rossetti; Lewis Carroll; Gerard Manley Hopkins; T. S. Eliot; Iris Murdoch; A. S. Byatt; Tom Stoppard; Kazuo Ishiguro; a selection of student-choice contemporary poets. Our books (the shorter works are available online): Dickens, A Christmas Carol (A Christmas Carol and Other Writings, Penguin); Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview); Murdoch, Under the Net (Penguin); Stoppard, Arcadia (Faber & Faber).

Literature in Canada
Term 1
TTh, 12:30 - 2:00 PM

The most defining characteristic of Canadian society, and Canadian writing, in the 21^st century may well be its diversity, and the novels and stories studied in this course will reflect a range of concerns, approaches and styles. Texts will include a collection of short stories set in Vancouver’s downtown east side, Margaret Atwood’s most recent dystopian novel, a work about a group of dogs granted human consciousness and language, and several other award-winning novels. Students will be encouraged to develop independent critical responses to the works studied, considering these texts in the context of contemporary Canadian society, personal experiences and broader critical perspectives. Assessment will include two in-class essays, a term paper and a final examination.

Literature in Canada
Term 2
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

This course will begin in “a little town,” seemingly homogeneous and united within its collective cultural identity (Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town). It will then proceed to complicate this little town and its survival (Journals of Susanna Moodie) by introducing texts that use both their form and content to offer alternative readings of Canadian subjectivity and history. What happens when the trauma of colonialism is translated into a fictional dystopian context (The Marrow Thieves)? What happens when a kappa (a Japanese mythological creature) lands on the Canadian prairies (Kappa Child)? Students will reconsider pioneer myths, the rewriting of national narratives, and later, both the limits and possibilities of diasporic identity and Canadian multiculturalism (Soucouyant). Overall, the class will be introduced to shifting representations and envisionings of Canadian identity in its literature.

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

This section will begin with a canonical text before jumping forward by four decades to focus on contemporary texts by Canadian authors. Alice Munro’s novel-in-stories, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), will provide our introduction to literary representations of Canadian youth. (It’s not required for the course; I’ll be discussing it and using Munro’s approach as a kind of framework for the actual required texts… Feel encouraged to read it, though. It’s a fine piece of work.) From there, five works: Awad’s 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl (linked short stories), Grubisic’s From Up River and For One Night Only (novel), Vermette’s The Break (novel), Wong’s The Woo Woo (memoir), and Knight’s Dear Current Occupant (memoir).

* Having at least one of these books purchased and read before the semester begins is HEARTILY recommended.

Literature in Canada
Term 1
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

See Course site

It has never been easy to define a Canadian Literature cohesively or conclusively. In this course, we will unpack this unease around questions of decolonization and diversity. How can we unsettle cultural nationalism? Why should we? What sort of citizenship, and what sort of literacy, emerges in the wake of this critical work? How do we re-constitute a sense of Canada as place, as history, as literary project? Reading work and engaging with media (such as comics, video and song) from a variety of often conflicted origins and backgrounds, we will confront these complicated and compelling questions around who and where we find ourselves to be.

Literature in Canada
Term 1
TTh, 2:00 - 3:30 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 222 is not yet available. Please contact the instructor directly.

Literature in the United States
Term 1
MWF, 12:00 - 1:00 PM

In the fall of 2001, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States embarked on what has come to be called the “War on Terror.” This war has included active combat in Afghanistan (2001-2014) and Iraq (2003-2011) but has not been limited to those places or dates. The New York Times reported recently that the U.S. has troops stationed in almost every country in the world. If you are a university student born around 2001, you have lived your whole life during this war.

This course surveys the literature of the “War on Terror.” We will focus not only on military narratives (written by veterans, for example) but also on narratives that reflect the militarization of everyday life. If, as the critic Patrick Deer has written, “wartime and everyday life have blurred . . . in American culture and society,” how is this blurring reflected in contemporary U.S. literature and culture? This question will invite us to consider how violence and fear are represented in—and critiqued by—the literature of our time. In the broadest sense, we will use it to explore topics of violence, trauma, race, and identity in a 21^st-century context.

Here is a list of possible films and texts: Phil Klay, "Redeployment"; Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk; Solnaz Sharif, Look (selections); Juliana Spahr,This Connection of Everyone with Lungs; Judith Butler, Frames of War (selections); Spike Lee, When the Levees Broke; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; Jessamyn Ward, Salvage the Bones.

Literature in the United States
Term 2
MWF, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

This course surveys some of the great innovators in the U.S. novel over the past 40 to 50 years, ranging across the stalwarts of realism, postmodernism, and the proliferation of important multicultural voices in the American canon. Questions we will address include: What have been the major innovations in fictional form in the U.S. in the past sixty years, and what forces seem to have driven them? What structures have writers developed in this era to demonstrate new layers of guilt, innocence, and moral complexity? Does the novel, as informational and imaginative medium, have authority in this era? If so, what sort of authority is it? What difference has the explosion in prominent ethnic writers within U.S. literature made for definitions of “American culture”? Students will write a close-reading paper (about 500 words) and two longer essays (1500 and 2000 words), as well as a final exam. Texts are likely to include Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad.

World Literature in English
Term 1
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

This course will look at classics of literature from around the world. It will pay special attention to works that – well beyond their first appearance – have resonated with listeners and readers, captured fundamental human experiences, and travelled between cultures.

Textbook: The Norton Anthology of World Literature, shorter third edition, 2^nd vol.

Readings will include: Novellas by Joseph Conrad and Leo Tolstoy; Stories by Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Rabindranath Tagore, V. S. Naipaul, Zhang Ailing, Lu Xun, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Th’iongo, Isabel Allende; Plays by Henrik Ibsen, and Antonin Chekhov; Non-fiction and poetry by Bashō and others, James Baldwin, W. B. Yeats, Mahmoud Darvish.

Requirements: 1 in-class essay = 20 points; 1 term paper = 30 points; 1 final exam = 35 points; participation, preparation, attendance = 15 points

World Literature in English
Term 2
MWF, 12:00 - 1:00 PM

This course examines transnational Asian literature and cultural productions that circulate across national borders even as they are shaped by and interrogate nation-states and national borders. We will ask: What are the relationships between the ongoing histories of Asian migration, diaspora, labour, and the production of transnational or diasporic Asian cultures? How do migrant and transnational networks expose and/or disrupt ongoing histories of colonialism and imperialism?

By analyzing novels, poetry, short stories, films, and digital media, students will encounter networks in the narratives of these texts, as well as in the ways that these cultural productions are shared and circulated. The course approaches scholarly discussions about migration and diaspora through the frameworks of feminist, Asian North American, and transpacific studies. As we engage with various cultural texts and histories of Empire, we will consider how migrant networks reveal connections and ruptures between bodies along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality. Such ruptures and connections, this course suggests, are also shaped by the shifting practices and platforms involved in literary production.

Students will complete reading responses, a creative assignment, a short essay, and a final exam.

World Literature in English
Term 2
MWF, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

ENGL 224: World Literature in English: Near and Far
Winter Term 2
MWF 2 pm

World literature as a category assumes that texts travel beyond their designated home in the world. This course will give students an opportunity to critique the designations of world literature and its accompanying cultural imaginaries. Who is the ideal reader of world literature? Where does world literature situate exilic, diasporic, transnational, or polylingual writers? How does it represent the popular? What forces structure the markets, circulations, and exchanges of world literature? We will study case histories, debates around framing narratives, and current issues of controversy, reading theoretical voices along with participants and dissidents. Two brief reponses to assigned readings, a term paper (with rough draft), and final exam.

Tentative Book List

• All I Asking for Is my Body, Milton Murayama
• Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz
•  Imaginary Maps, Mahasweta Devi
• Annie John, Jamaica Kinkaid
• Sozaboy, Ken Saro-Wiwa
• Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi
• Other materials as supplied on the Canvas course site or distributed in class

Possible films: Moana. Midaq Alley. Monsoon Wedding. The films will be viewed outside of class; an optional screening will be offered, and the films will also be available on UBC library course reserve for those unable to attend the screenings.

Poetry
Term 1
TTh, 12:30 - 2:00 PM

We commonly think of poetry as hard, and it can be, but it can also be fun! This course will help you to learn to read poetry more skillfully and experience its pleasures. We’ll look at contemporary as well as historical poems and pay attention to various techniques, tropes and traditions that help us to understand them. We will spend some time in our course reading poems, writing poems and learning to write critically about the work we encounter. Students will recite a poem, give a short talk about it, write a short essay and term paper. If you’re interested in writing poetry and reading it, and learning more about how to write critically about it, this is the course for you! We’ll read a variety of poems from the Broadview Introduction to Literature: Poetry that span from the Romantic (to the contemporary period and work from Susan Holbrook’s How to Read (and Write About) Poetry as we learn to write critically.

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

This introductory course will focus on the genre of comedy in theatre, and examine theories of laughter and drama through the study of a broad range of comic plays. From Aristophanes to Tom Stoppard, playwrights have used laughter as a means to interrogate authorities and orthodoxies, whether political or social. In this hands-on course, we will balance intellectual inquiry and active engagement with the plays in the classroom, through close reading and scene performance. We will also get the chance to attend live theatre, as two of our plays are being performed at Bard on the Beach. This course fulfills the literature/outside credits for students in all faculties.

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

The course description for this section of ENGL 227 is not yet available. Please contact the instructor directly.

Topics in the Study of Language and/or Rhetoric
Term 1
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

This course is an introduction to Rhetoric: the art and study of persuasion.  Recorded interest in rhetoric goes back about 2500 years, but rhetoric’s central questions remain urgent today: In any situation, who is persuading whom of what, and what are the means of persuasion? How do we come to believe what we believe—and act on that belief—and what does it take to make us change our minds?

Of special interest, at this moment, is how Donald Trump remains persuasive enough that his re-election in 2020 is imaginable. And how are certain Canadian politicians adapting, for their own purposes, Trump’s populist appeals? Rhetoric, though, is not only, or even mostly, about politics. We are all in rhetorical situations all the time—both as agents of persuasion ourselves (we, consciously or not, typically seek the agreement of others) and as people acted upon. We may be persuaded that there are still debates about anthropogenic climate change or the advisability of vaccination, although scientific consensus has settled those matters. Public health campaigns advise us to do certain things (like exercise) and not do others (like smoke cigarettes), and we are sometimes persuaded and sometimes not. Advertisements urge us to purchase certain products, but offer us no defensible reason to do so. Technologies too can be persuasive: Fitbits, just by being worn, can persuade us to act in particular ways (10,000 steps anyone?). The list goes on.  This course equips students with some basic rhetorical theory, some tools of rhetorical analysis, and, more generally, a rhetorical perspective on everyday life.

Topics in the Study of Language and/or Rhetoric
Term 2
MWF, 1:00 - 2:00 PM

Expressing meaning is why we use language in the first place, but understanding how we choose the words is not straightforward. How do we decide whether to see the tree in front of the house or the house behind the tree? Why can someone’s smile be described as warm or cold even though temperature is not the issue? If someone has done something nice for you, why do say you owe them? In the course, we will learn how linguistic meaning emerges at the intersection of our embodied experience, our conceptual abilities, and our social and cultural context. Through reading and analysis of examples, we will learn what it means to view language as a tool supporting conceptualization. Examples illustrating the concepts will come from various areas of linguistic usage, including a range of textual genres, some grammatical constructions, and the discourse of the media.

Introduction to Indigenous Literatures
Term 2
MWF, 12:00 - 1:00 PM

Kwakwaka'wakw artist Sonny Assu's button blanket called "When Raven Became Spider" provided the title for a 2014 exhibition on the theme of Raven's transformation. As the exhibition catalog says, this is a time which "requires a new, shared understanding of heroism, and new kinds of superheroes" imagined by Indigenous artists working at the intersection of tradition and contemporary media.

Guided by Assu's words, we'll discuss examples of writing by contemporary Indigenous writers who engage transformation in the context of the impacts of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples and lands.  Using such contemporary forms as manga, graphic novel and erasure poetry as well as memoir and novel, these writers re/imagine heroism and superheroes at the intersection of new technologies and ancient ones, transforming narratives of darkness and sometimes creating light.  Among the writers to be considered are: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Red - A Haida Manga), Cherrie Dimaline (The Marrow Thieves), Richard Van Camp (Three Feathers Nisto Mekwana), Richard Wagamese (Indian Horse), Katherena Vermette (The Break), and Terese Marie Mailhot (Heart Berries).

Approaches to Media Studies
Term 1
MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 232 is not yet available. Please contact the instructor directly.

Approaches to Media Studies
Term 2
TTh, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 232 is not yet available. Please contact the instructor directly.

Shakespeare Now
Term 2
MWF, 10:00 - 11:00 AM

Ben Jonson once said of Shakespeare that “he was not of an age but for all time!” This course will test this statement by considering the presence of Shakespeare in our contemporary world.  We will read a selection of Shakespeare’s plays but we will also explore adaptations of Shakespeare’s work in film and in prose as well as in a range of new media including manga Shakespeare. We will think with Shakespeare through questions of race, gender and sexuality and environmentalism – questions that preoccupied Shakespeare and his contemporaries and continue to perplex us today. Finally, we will think about what it means to study Shakespeare “here” – that is specifically at UBC in 2018.

Introduction to Children's and Young Adult Literature
Term 1
MWF, 1:00 - 2:00 PM

This course will examine writing for younger readers from the 18th to the early 21st century. In our readings and discussions of British, American, and Canadian children’s and young adult literature, we will examine how changing understandings of childhood and adolescence are reflected in the literary genres that adults developed to socialize and regulate the conduct of the young. Texts will likely include fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, and the Brothers Grimm, as well as modern adaptations by Francesca Lia Block and Emma Donoghue; didactic poems by Isaac Watts and John Bunyan, and nonsense verse by Lewis Carroll, Shel Silverstein, and Dennis Lee; C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass; and Neil Gaiman, Coraline.

Speculative Fiction
Term 1
TTh, 2:00 - 3:30 PM

With its roots in the imagined, the anticipated, the hoped-for, and the feared, speculative fiction is a powerful literature for exploring otherwise--other ways of being and belonging--through consideration of fantastical worlds, alternate realities in our own world, unfamiliar pasts, and possible futures. We will consider a diverse range of science fiction, fantasy, and horror works and scholarship, with texts exploring issues as diverse as secondary-world quest fantasy and post-apocalyptic survival in North America to robot uprisings, zombie alternative history, and genetically modified monsters. In so doing, we will analyze how these otherwise texts help us reflect upon, challenge, and complicate our own understandings of ourselves, one another, and our shared future together.

Comics and Graphic Media
Term 2
MWF, 10:00 - 11:00 AM
See Course Site

In this course, we will survey key texts in emerging canons of graphic media—hybrids and mixtures of comics, illustrated texts, cartoons, graphic novels, graffiti, visual media and other genres—with an eye to establishing workable critical reading practices. What do graphic texts tell us about the limits of literature, and about the relationships between art and popular culture? How has the emergence of mass-produced graphic forms and genres impacted on the ways in which we read, and on how we value and evaluate writing? What has become of our sense of what constitutes a book or even a page? How do graphic media encourage us to reflect on the visual, spatial and material forms of representation, in language and in other sign systems and mediums? How is graphic media's increasing popularity, its burgeoning readership, tied to certain conceptions of identity, subjectivity, sociality and literacy?

Literature and Film
Term 2
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

“Which was better, the book or the film?” This question has too often become the cornerstone of modern debates about 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, plays, short stories, 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. Literary texts on the course will include Harold Pinter, The Homecoming; Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber; Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; and others. Films will include Vertigo; Blade Runner; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies; V for Vendetta; Star Wars; and others.

Technical Writing
Term 2
TTh, 9:30 - 11:00 a.m.

Don’t let the name fool you: this is not a course in remedial grammar! Technical Writing examines principles and practices of communication in various professional contexts (mostly online). You will produce a formal report, investigating resources and/or concerns in a real-life community and making recommendations for improvement or solution. Production of this report will involve the study (and possibly practical application) of research ethics where human subjects are involved (e.g. in conducting surveys or interviews). Think of this course as an extended report-writing Boot Camp: intensive, useful preparation for the last phase of your undergraduate degree, as you start applying to professional and graduate programs, and for the years beyond of work and community involvement. Please check my blog at http://blogs.ubc.ca/drgmbaxter/ for updates concerning the course, its texts, and its requirements. Note: this is a blended course, with both classroom and online components and requirements. While technical competence in writing is required, the course will not cover grammar and mechanics (though it will provide lots of writing resources on its Canvas site). Technical Writing is closed to first- and second-year students in Arts, and cannot be used for credit towards the English Major or Minor.

Technical Writing
Term A
Online Course
This section of ENGL 301 is offered online. To  see the course description, click here.

Technical Writing
Term C
Online Course
This section of ENGL 301 is offered online. To  see the course description, click here.

Advanced Composition
Term C
Online Course

This section of ENGL 304 is offered online. A link to CTLT will be posted at a later date.

Are you trying to figure out new ways to strengthen your writing? Have you always wanted to develop a recognizable writing voice of your own? Do you want to figure out how to make the strongest impact on your readers? Are you interested in exploring the differences between writing for, say, The Vancouver Sun, The Guardian, Vice, and an academic journal? Are you considering going into teaching and wondering how to go about talking to your students about their own writing? If you find yourself thinking about these sorts of questions, this is definitely the course you should take. The class approaches the study and practice of writing with a focus on audience, authorial voice, and style. It emphasizes the writing process and the rhetorical concerns and principles (situation, genre, intent) which govern that process. We will start by working our way through an overview of traditional Artistotelian (or classical) rhetoric, but we’ll also consider more recent (20th and 21st century) theorizing of genre and communications.

Students get to do in depth studies of communities of practice; they learn to situate and develop their own rhetorical strengths. They also get to argue thoughtfully, hopefully even vigorously, with their instructor and classmates, and to prepare a final project aimed at a real and carefully identified community of readers (best case scenario: you aim for and actually do submit that article for publication).

Studies in Rhetoric
Term 1
MWF, 10:00 - 11:00 a.m.

In Rhetoric, Revolution, & Dissent students will learn about how social movements use and design persuasive messages, images, artifacts, and events. Course readings will include: 1.) primary documents, such as manifestos, memes, organizational programs, speeches, and websites, drawn from both recent movements (e. g. Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, and Idle No More) and more distant historical events (e. g. the U.S. Civil Rights Movement and the French Revolution); 2.) a survey of rhetorical and argumentative criticism; and 3.) a brief survey of visual rhetoric. By assessing both more and less successful persuasive tactics, strategies, and genres, the course will teach students how communication strategies help to stimulate and maintain resistance and revolt (or not). Students will complete a series of assignments that entail analyzing the rhetoric of a social movement’s primary documents and artifacts, and then complete a final project that analyzes the movement’s means of persuasion and communication strategy.

Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Term 2
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

On May 8, 2016, the main segment of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver concerned scientific studies. Oliver talked about media reports of not-really-scientific studies that invite people to believe that certain findings, even in the face of completely contradictory findings, are reasonable bases for decision making, especially on matters of health. You can see Oliver’s 19-minute segment at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw. Less than two years later, it has had nearly 12 million views. English 309 takes up, among its topics, some of Oliver’s concerns.

Although we typically think of science as existing in a realm separate from the realm of rhetoric (that is, persuasion), it is actually the case that science, even when it is working very well, relies on persuasion quite a bit. In fact, persuasion occurs in spaces we don’t typically think of as rhetorical: in the pages of scientific journals, in laboratories, in working groups tasked with arriving at diagnostic categories, in meetings of the FDA, and so on.

Given the prominence of health topics in public discourse currently, the course pays special attention to the rhetoric of health and medicine, especially as scientific (and quasi-scientific) knowledge migrates into a public realm. Here are some questions we’ll consider: What are the strategies, and what are the effects, of direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription pharmaceuticals?  How does the Internet, and how does public-health messaging, help to shape the contemporary health subject?  What is the persuasive effect of technologies of self-tracking?   Is the “vaccine controversy” really a controversy?

Note: English 309 requires no special preparation in rhetorical theory or in science and medicine.

Studies in Rhetoric: Classical Theory and Contemporary Persuasion
Term 1
MWF, 1:00 - 2:00 PM

Every year, it seems, Dale Carnegie’s 1937 How to Win Friends and Influence People appears on “self-help” bestseller lists: in March 2018, it was the Globe and Mail’s #3 bestseller, sitting between You Are a Badass . . . and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*uck, both published rather more recently, Part of what accounts for Carnegie’s relentless success is that strategies of persuasion—the means of moving people to one’s own point of view (for better or for worse)—haven’t changed very much, not only in the last 80 years, but also, arguably, in the last 2500.  When Aristotle’s Rhetoric appeared in the 4th Century BCE, it described “the available means of persuasion” in ways that remain useful for those who wish to influence other people (who doesn’t?) and those who wish to understand how other people influence them: in politics, law, advertising, science, and interpersonal relationships. This course moves back and forth between ancient and contemporary rhetorical theories, and between rhetorical theory and rhetorical practice. It seeks to answer questions like these: How, in daily life, are minds made up and changed?  What do people say to get other people to trust them?  Why is Donald Trump President of the United States? (And why does it make sense to study Plato and Aristotle and Cicero when political pronouncements can arrive, sometimes in the middle of night, in tweets?)

History and Theory of Rhetoric: The Later Theory
Term 2
MWF, 10:00 - 11:00 AM

What is rhetoric, and how does rhetoric work? How you can persuade your friends, family, colleagues, and strangers? Some of the most infamous intellectuals in in the history of European thought vehemently disagree about the answers to these questions, but taken together, their answers provide a blueprint for rhetorical theory. By reading and applying major rhetorical theories advanced in the major epochs of western intellectual history, students will learn how writers such as St. Augustine, Erasmus, Castiglione, Vico, Nietzsche, and Kenneth Burke (among others) conceived the arts of persuasion, argumentation, and style.

Discourse and Society: Analysing Spoken Discourse
Term 1
MWF, 12:00 - 1:00 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 312 is not available at this time. Please contact the instruction for course information.

History of the English Language: Early History
Term 1
TTh, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

This course provides an understanding of how the English language has changed in from its Indo-European origins to the end of the Anglo-Saxon period (1100). It begins with discussion of attitudes towards language change, the nature, causes, and mechanisms of linguistic change, and the genealogical and typological classification of languages. It then embarks upon a survey of the historical development of English.

Considering first the prehistoric changes from Proto-Indo-European to Germanic, we will then study how the language called Old English (449-1100). developed. We will look at all aspects of the Old English language, including its sounds (phonology), spelling (orthography), forms of words and their endings (morphology), sentence structure (syntax), and meanings of words (semantics), and vocabulary. Our focus will be on the “synthetic” nature of Old English grammar. In addition to language-internal causes of change, there will be discussion of the “external history” of the language, that is, the historical, political, and social events that shaped Old English.

Evaluation is in terms of four online quizzes, two in-class midterms, and a short written project. For a complete description, see http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/lbrinton/

**** No formal background in language or linguistics is required, but students must have third-year standing and have completed the Writing Requirement of their Faculty.****

History of the English Language: Later History
Term 2
MWF, 12:00 - 1:00 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 319 is not yet available.  Please contact the instructor directly.

English Grammar and Usage
Term 1
TTh, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

The English 321 course provides an introduction to English grammar and its use in everyday communication. We take a descriptive stance when considering the rules of grammar, starting with the study of words and their parts, proceeding to word classes, phrases and clauses, and concluding with the different communicative functions that grammatical structures can perform when we package information in particular ways. This course equips students with skills to identify and describe the effects of derived or deviant structures in various communicative situations and provides a strong basis for further study of the English language and of literary and non-literary stylistics as well as for teaching English. The course includes numerous exercises analyzing sentences and chunks of discourse. There are four short collaborative assignments, two monthly tests, and a final exam counting 30% of the final grade. The prescribed books are Börjars & Burridge (2010) and Leech, Deuchar and Hoogenraad (2006). More details are available on the course website on canvas.ubc.ca.

English Grammar and Usage
Term 2
MWF, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 321 is not available at this time.

English Grammar and Usage
Term C
Distance Education

This section of ENGL 321 is offered online. To  see the course description, click here.

The English 321 course provides an introduction to English grammar and its use in everyday communication. We take a descriptive stance when considering the rules of grammar, starting with the study of words and their parts, proceeding to word classes, phrases and clauses, and concluding with the different communicative functions that grammatical structures can perform when we package information in particular ways. This course equips students with skills to identify and describe the effects of derived or deviant structures in various communicative situations and provides a strong basis for further study of the English language and of literary and non-literary stylistics as well as for teaching English. The course includes numerous exercises analyzing sentences and chunks of discourse. There are four short collaborative assignments, two monthly tests, and a final exam counting 30% of the final grade. The prescribed books are Börjars & Burridge (2010) and Leech, Deuchar and Hoogenraad (2006). More details are available on the course website on canvas.ubc.ca.

Stylistics
Term C
Distance Education

This section of ENGL 322 is offered online. To  see the course description, click here.

The stylistics course is an introduction to the linguistic analysis of poems, prose and plays. We make a close study of a variety of literary texts in each of the three main genres, looking at some sub-genres of each, and apply our knowledge of language in general and of specific techniques developed in linguistics to interpret the literary message. Students participate in two collaborative workshops, one analyzing and interpreting the language of a poem and one the language of a play. Students write a term paper in which they offer a stylistic analysis of a short story of their own choice. There is a final exam contributing 30% of the final grade. The prescribed books are Short (1996) and Simpson (2014). More details are available on the course website on canvas.ubc.ca.

Varieties of English
Term 2
TTh, 2:00 - 3:30 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 323A is not yet available. Please contact the instructor directly.

English Corpus Linguistics
Term 1
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

 Do you say:

 I didn’t think it was so funny or I didn’t think it was that funny or I didn’t think it was very funny or I didn’t think it was really funny?

He is more friendly than I expected or He is friendlier than I expected?

I must finish my paper tonight or I have to finish my paper tonight?

If I was a bit taller or If I were a bit taller?

Everyone should take their seats or Everyone should take his or her seat?

I have already opened the can or I already opened the can?

The bike wheel sunk into the mud or The bike wheel sank into the mud?

You can’t lay around all day or You can’t lie around all day?

While some of these represent structures that have been treated by prescriptive grammars as “usage mistakes”, others have escaped their notice. All likely represent “changes in progress” in contemporary English. In this course we will study grammatical changes ongoing in English as it is spoken and written in the twenty-first century. Apart from very obvious changes, such as the use of be like or be all by younger speakers as a “quotative” (And he was like, “I’m out of here”), there are many less obvious changes, as shown above.

In order to study such changes, you will be introduced to the methodology of corpus linguistics, including the framing of appropriate research questions, search methods for collecting data using electronic data, and the analysis and presentation of empirical data. You will become familiar with using a number of different online corpora, newspaper collections, quotation databases, and text collections. A set of graded exercises will be used to acquire these necessary skills.

For your final project, you will choose a structure, and using corpus linguistic methods to collect data, seek to understand how it is changing in present-day English.

**** No formal background in language or linguistics is required, but students must have third-year standing and have completed the Writing Requirement of their Faculty.****

Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Meaning
Term 1
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

In the course, we study cognitive approaches to language to learn how meaning is created and received. To get started, we investigate general mechanisms of meaning emergence, in a range of contexts, and then we look at various literary and dicourse genres. Throughout the course we apply the ideas learned to analyses of a range of literary and non-fiction texts, with a focus the nature of linguistic creativity. This approach clarifies the meanings in colloquial language, while showing how the most original literary uses rely on some of the same mechanisms, though in less constrained ways. We also look at examples form genres such as journalistic prose, political rhetoric, and internet discourse. Students will learn to discuss meaning at all levels of linguistic structure and interpret various types of expressions. More importantly, students will be able to connect the study of language and of literature to a broad understanding of how the human mind processes and creates meaning. This approach to language study, combining the study of language, literature, and conceptualization is known as Cognitive Poetics.

Metaphor, Language and Thought
Term 2
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

We perceive our colloquial use of language as literal and descriptive. Recent research has shown, however, that all language use is pervasively figurative – it often relies on our understanding of one situation in terms of another. In the course, we study recent approaches to meaning to understand how underlying cognitive patterns structure our use of language. First, we discuss metaphor, metonymy, and blending – three major types of conceptual structures. In the second part, we look at grammatical phenomena, cross-linguistic facts, and, most prominently, discourse types. Further, we apply the concepts learned to interpreting artifacts of popular culture, advertising, media, and various forms of internet discourse. Students are required to grasp the theoretical concepts and use them in their own analyses of data samples. All assignments rely primarily on analytical skills.

The Structure of Modern English: Sounds and Words
Term 1
MWF, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

In this course, we study the sound system of English (phonology) and word formation and classification in English (morphology). We begin by studying how speech sounds are articulated and we learn to transcribe English speech sounds using the phonetic alphabet. We identify both the distinctive sounds of English and the sound combinations possible in English, as well as the patterns of stress, intonation, and syllabification. We turn next to an analysis of the meaningful units in language – affixes and roots – and examine how they combine to form words, are grammatically modified, and can be classified into parts of speech. Last, we consider both traditional and structural approaches to the question of word meaning (semantics), giving some attention to cognitive approaches to meaning.

In English 330, emphasis is placed upon the description of English rather than on any particular theory of linguistics.

Required text: L.J. Brinton and D.M. Brinton, The Linguistic Structure of Modern English (Benjamins 2010).

Prerequisites: Third-year standing and completion of the writing requirement in one’s Faculty. No previous linguistics or language course is required. ENGL 330 and 331 may be taken concurrently or in reverse sequence.

Course evaluation: The written work required in this course includes: three non-comprehensive unit tests (in-class) and six on-line quizzes. Students will expected to complete ungraded, self-testing homework exercises.

The Structure of Modern English: Sounds and Words
Term A
Distance Education

This section of ENGL 330 is offered online. To  see the course description, click here.

 This course provides a comprehensive introduction to English phonology, morphology, parts of speech, and lexical (word) meaning. We start by studying the smallest units of language, speech sounds, and work our way up to larger structures until we reach the level of words and their meanings. Students are required to become proficient in phonetic transcription, including becoming familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet as it pertains to present-day varieties of English. The course is offered from a descriptive perspective, an approach not situated exclusively in any specific linguistic theory. There are three collaborative assignments, six quizzes, and a final exam counting 40% of the final grade. The prescribed book is Brinton & Brinton (2010). More details are available on the course website on canvas.ubc.ca.

The Structure of Modern English: Sentences and Their Uses
Term 1
TTh, 12:30 - 2:00 PM

In this course, we study primarily the English sentence from a broad, functional perspective. We learn how to analyze, describe and classify sentential forms and their constituents and will take a look at the fuzzy areas of syntax (all grammars "leak", as one famous linguist once called it). The overall goal will be to become conversant in English syntactical analysis, while keeping an eye to sentence semantics and their meanings. This functional "nuts and bolts" approach will be complemented with a pragmatic element (language in use) that probes into how speakers (and writers, texters etc.) choose linguistic items to fit a particular social contexts, which find their expression in text types (genres), levels of formality and the like. The focus of the course is on reliable descriptions of how the language is used and not on any particular linguistic theory ("school"). While the overall perspective is functional (rather than, say, generative), the knowledge taught here can be labelled "theory neutral" (if such perspective really existed). No linguistics background is required. Students will learn a broad range of technical vocabulary and analytical procedures to achieve the overall goal, which is to develop the knowledge and skill to work independently on syntactic examples and problems.

Textbook: Downing, Angela. 2015. English Grammar: A University Course. 3^rd ed. London: Routledge.

Note on editions: the second edition is about 90% the same as the 3^rd and is sometimes found significantly less expensive than the current edition. While you will have problems with the examples, which have been renumbered and partially reworked, if you're willing to put up with getting the missing material from peers, it is possible to use the 2^nd edition of the book if you're a bit in a crunch.

The Structure of Modern English: Sentences and Their Uses
Term 2
TTh, 12:30 - 2:00 PM

This 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).

Course evaluation: There will be 3 tests of equal weight (31%) and a class participation mark of 7%. 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.

Approaches to Media History (BMS section)
Term 1
TTh, 9:30 - 11:00 AM

This class explores the history of media and mediation from the early modern period to today. It will combine theoretical reading and discussion with hands-on project-based learning and a continuing process of personal reflection. Students will have the opportunity to investigate the historical development of analog and digital knowledge technologies, to explore their practical use, and to use digital media to organize and explain their findings. Emphasis will be placed on the page—a basic unit in the history of printed books and (O)LED screens—and its ecologies, or the environments in which it has been produced and used. You will work with the resources of UBC Rare Books and Special Collections to produce an online exhibit that highlights UBC’s amazing media history resources and the historical forms of communication media.

Approaches to Media History
Term 2
MWF, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

The first lesson we learn about media history is that it goes in a circle; it is not progressive but recursive. Twitter remediates orality, which is where the course will begin. We will then examine scribal culture, the printing revolution, and the electronic mediascape in the contexts of rhetoric, humanism, and the contemporary post-humanist moment. If all goes well, we will end up where we started, but this time we’ll know what our smartphones are doing to us.

Literature and Science
Term 2
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

In this course, we will look at the relations between fiction and science in British fiction from the early nineteenth-century through the early Modernist period. Reading literary texts alongside some scientific writing, we will examine the ways in which literary authors responded to contemporary science. We will consider fiction that represent scientists (a term coined in the period) and scientific issues, such as the practice of vivisection, evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, and the workings of the brain. We will explore the texts’ uses of the language of science, and ask whether scientific theories influence the formal features of fiction in the period. The course will also examine the genre of scientific romance (what we now call science fiction), which emerged in the period. Texts read will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and stories by H. G. Wells and Conan Doyle.

Introduction to Old English
Term 1
MWF, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

“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 provides 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: an exile paddles in the ice with his bare hands, listening to birdsong; 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—like a set of pronouns that describes only pairs and couples. In addition, you will watch and hear Old English poetry performed, learn to use the digitized Old English Corpus and Dictionary of Old English, and compare modern literary translations of Old English poems. 

Old English Literature
Term 2
MWF, 1:00 - 2:00 PM

NIGHT came. He went
To check out those Danes
boozing at home in their
big house & pay them a call.

He found
them snoozing like fat, well
fed babies safe from boogies.

(Thomas Meyer, Beowulf)

How far can you go in translating a thousand-year-old poem? How do you balance relevance and authenticity? What does it mean to translate Beowulf into other platforms—to screen, graphic novel, performance, fan fiction, or new media? By asking these questions and by reading contemporary theory, we will get at some of the most pressing issues in literary translation. Primary texts include Beowulf translations by Thomas Meyer, Seamus Heaney, and Meghan Purvis.

Medieval Studies
Term 1
TTh, 12:30 - 2:00 PM

Arthur, The Once and Future King: ‘Herein may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, murder, hate, virtue, and sin.’

The canon of Arthurian Literature is long, complex, and highly entertaining. From its shadowy origins in the pseudo-histories of the post-roman period in British history, the legends were taken up by medieval writers as the central narrative of Britain’s past. Moving into royal favour, the legends took on political and national importance as the medieval period progressed. And in more recent centuries, the allure of the Arthurian world has continued to hold the imagination, with writers ranging from Tennyson to Steinbeck to Twain to Ishiguro, all reworking the legends for their own cultural moments. Students will leave come out of this course with a clear sense of the important place of the Arthurian legends within the history of literature in English, alongside an advanced knowledge of current critical conversations within the field.

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

Medieval literary texts often depict journeys through fantastic realms. Uncanny otherworlds are everywhere in medieval literature—Grendel’s mere in Beowulf, the vale of the Green Knight’s chapel in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the places of the afterlife toured by Dante in the Divine Comedy. Sometimes a dreamer is granted privileged insight and understanding when a guide grants access to a location normally inaccessible to humans; sometimes a traveller surpasses the limits of the known world and returns with stories of fantastic places and peoples far away; sometimes a mishap or an enchantment removes an adventuring hero into a mysterious landscape filled with marvels. In this course we will explore these imagined medieval geographies—non-places and utopia that situate medieval hopes and dreams, anxieties and fears. We will use a wide range of texts, primarily from post-Conquest medieval England and in the original Middle English, to approach the medieval conception of questions including: where do dreams come from? how do we know what is true? what is real? and where are we, and just what is the world, anyway? We will also look at post-medieval medieval places, as our own modern fictive answers to such questions are inescapably shaped by the persistence of these medieval literary motifs.

Chaucer and the Middle Ages
Term 1
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

With the help of a reader-friendly edition and a series of structured but gentle lessons, you will acquire facility in reading Chaucer’s Middle English. More importantly, you will learn how Chaucer makes use of his language’s power in assembling a series of narratives ostensibly told by the diverse company of pilgrims he met on the way to Canterbury. The pilgrims’ tales create a conversation about many themes, including class, love, sex and gender, work, language, the nature of narrative itself, and the pleasures and travails of studenthood, and our class meetings will reflect the collection’s spirit with regular sessions of open discussion. We will consider the linguistic and literary innovations that led readers to consider Chaucer the “father of English poetry” together with the sense of humour – by turns satirical, bawdy, and self-deprecating – that makes reading his poetry a constant joy.

Renaissance Studies
Term 1
TTh, 12:30 - 2:00 PM

The literary texts of the Renaissance—most obviously those by Shakespeare and Milton—have frequently been used as examples of what literature of major importance looks like. In this course, however, we shall look at works that have typically been classified as minor or even as bad. We shall interrogate the assumptions behind judgments of importance or literary merit and we shall find out what pleasures can be had in reading works that have been consigned to minor status.

Texts:

• Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey Selected Poems
• William Shakespeare King John
• John Milton Comus, A Maske
• Sir Thomas Browne Religio Medici
• Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World
• John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester Selected Poems

Shakespeare and the Renaissance
Term 1
MWF, 10:00 - 11:00 AM

Out of the ecletic mix of ideas that was Renaissance thought, stoicism and Machiavellianism exercised a particularly powerful influence. Although not directly familiar with these philosophies, the period’s dramatists recognized their literary potential. The Stoic and Machiavellian could often be paired against each other as hero and villain, and the two philosophies also encouraged competing attitudes towards Fortune or Providence, with the former counselling fortitude (which was easily rebranded as Christian patience) and the latter countering with virtú and prudence. This course will look at incarnations of these drama-friendly philosophies in five works of Shakespeare and Chapman’s The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois.

Required Texts:

• Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
• Shakespeare, Hamlet
• Shakespeare, Othello
• Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
• Shakespeare, King Lear
• Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois

Shakespeare and the Renaissance
Term A
Distance Education

This section of ENGL 348 is offered online. To  see the course description, click here.

Students who successfully complete ENGL 348A will have demonstrated an ability to read and to analyze the richness of Shakespeare’s language, dramatic characterization, and plotting; a familiarity with the economic, the intellectual, the political, the religious, the sexual, and the social conditions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and how these conditions may have informed Shakespeare’s plays; and a thorough understanding of the genres and theatrical conventions Shakespeare employed on the Renaissance stage. We will also consider his relevance to the present day.

We will study the following plays: Titus Andronicus, Henry V, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale.

Shakespeare and the Renaissance
Term 1
MWF, 1:00 - 2:00 PM

Focusing on five of Shakespeare's plays, and a number of his sonnets, our course will consider Shakespeare's work in terms of genre. Influenced by genre theory, we will consider genre as a combination of form and social situation. How did Shakespeare's work both reflect and disrupt pre-existing genres? And how do selected scholarly, literary, and filmic interpretations of Shakespeare's work reflect changing conceptions of genre since Shakespeare's time?

For example, how do contemporary film directors respond to the challenge posed by early modern "comedies" like The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, which contain elements that twenty-first century audiences often find decidedly unfunny?

Students will complete a sonnet close-reading exercise; a creative project (dramatic performance or movie review); an in-class essay (with the option to revise); a research essay (complete with proposal and peer draft workshop); and a final exam.

Shakespeare and the Renaissance
Term 2
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

In this course we shall explore the careers of two of Renaissance England’s most celebrated literary contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) and William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Typically, we’ll examine some of their major works in pairs – for example, Marlowe’s Edward IIwith Shakespeare’s Richard IIand Marlowe’s Hero and Leanderwith Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis– to investigate how each engages comparable subject matter (the suspect English monarch and erotic pursuit and consummation in these examples) and similar literary form (the history play and the narrative poem). Our efforts, in the first instance, will be directed toward elaborating two critical commonplaces about Shakespeare and Marlowe: first, that because the innovative and popular Kit Marlowe predeceased Will Shakespeare by some 23 years, he exerted a profound influence over Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and poetry; second, that “Marlowe” – his life and his literature – functions in contemporary scholarship as shorthand for sodomy, a crime encompassing but not limited to homosexuality, whereas “Shakespeare” serves to establish and secure a heterosexual imaginary. We’ll of course work to unsettle these commonplaces not simply by highlighting counterexamples – there ishomosexuality in Shakespeare – but, more importantly, by thinking about the usefulness of the interpretive scaffolding that has made them both possible and plausible: biography.

There will be three short papers (60%) and a final exam (30%). The remainder of your course mark (10%) will be determined by attendance and class participation.  

Shakespeare and the Renaissance
Term 2
MWF, 12:00 - 1:00 PM

This course will focus primarily on the plays of Shakespeare, with some attention given to other Renaissance dramatic and non-dramatic works.  We will discuss cultural history, contemporary religious, philosophical, and political controversy, and elements of domestic life and social interaction relevant for the study of these works.  We will explore the conditions influencing production and the participation of these plays in the ideological and theatrical aspects of Elizabethan playing and audience reception.  A variety of different critical approaches will be examined, including those of earlier decades, and those more current.

Shakespeare’s theatre can be seen as a commercial enterprise, licensed by the authorities, and dependent on royal patronage, involving complex negotiations of class and subjectivity. It can also be seen as a marginal or liminal space wherein the dilemmas and dreams of Shakespeare’s time and now of our own can be evoked and given form; where competing cultural voices find expression; where “things as they are” can be challenged by the very manner of their representation.  The dramatic poetry of Shakespeare is both historical document and unfinished experiment - a boundlessly eventful experiential realm. Students will study six plays, four with full coverage in the classroom and two with briefer coverage in class.  We will also consider a handful of the sonnets.  To enhance our understanding of the dramatic texts in their time, we will discuss other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, and some important figures of the English and Continental Renaissance, such as Spenser, Montaigne, Thomas Hobbes and Machiavelli.  Selections from film versions of the plays will be viewed as time permits.

Plays:  Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale; Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling

Play texts will be available at the UBC Bookstore. Supplementary readings, such as Shakespeare’s sonnets, will be available online.

Course requirements:  Students will be asked to write one in-class essay (25%), one term paper (40%), and the final exam (30%), and will also be asked to produce a creative presentation (5%).  Regarding the latter, students may choose between individual or group work, and will have considerable choice of media and method. Students may prefer to act in a classroom performance of a scene or part of a scene from one of the plays on our list.  Students may choose to rewrite, write a related piece of their own in any form, direct rather than act, or work on costumes and props.  They may produce visual art, musical pieces (such as songs or interpretive responses), dance performances, set design, film, poetry, puppet shows, talk shows, wrestling matches, folk plays, pantomime, etc.   For anyone who is utterly opposed to being involved in a class performance or presenting their art, there is another option: you may write a review of any performance of a Shakespeare play which you have seen recently, on film or in the theatre. The purpose of this exercise is to encourage the reception of Shakespeare’s dramatic art as theatre, or as extra-textual experience, rather than as literature written for the page.

A bibliographical guide to Shakespeare scholarship will be distributed in the third week of term.

Seventeenth-Century Studies
Term 1
MWF, 12:00 - 1:00 PM

The course will focus on changing ideas of humans and animals in the Renaissance as expressed in the literature and drama of the time.  We will explore the shifting paradigms governing the status and role of animals, beginning in classical antiquity and moving forward through medieval Europe to England in the Renaissance.  We will note how the definition of the human is closely tied to the definition of the animal, and how at one extreme species exist hierarchically, and in tension with each other, while elsewhere the borders between humans and animals are being crossed, and even erased.  To this end we will examine both theatrical texts and non-dramatic documents, from biblical accounts, classical natural history, medieval bestiaries and animal trials, to accounts of bear-baiting, menagerie keeping, hunting, falconry, riding, and attitudes towards meat, observing the changes in cultural, scientific and literary representations of animals.  We will examine how some literary works use animals and animal imagery, especially in order to interrogate, exalt, degrade, or otherwise mediate the contentious category of the human.  We will also reflect on how representations of animals, humans as animals, or human-animal hybrids might influence the possibility of inter-species and same-species empathy.

Texts:  Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen, selections from Books 1, 2 & 3; William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King Lear; Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair; John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi; John Milton, selections from Paradise Lost

Secondary Texts: selections from Aristotle, De Anima, De Animalibus Historia; selections from Bestiary, trans. & ed. Richard Barber, selections from The Book of Beasts, Being a Translation from a Latin Bestiary of the Twelfth Century, ed. & trans. T. H. White; Sir Philip Sidney, selections from The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia; selections from Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raimond Sebond; Margaret Cavendish, “The Hunting of the Hare”, selections from Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Milton and the Seventeenth Century
Term 2
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

In this course we’ll look at Milton’s career and his sense of himself as a poet and as a man. We’ll read Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “L’Allegro, “Il Penseroso,” “A Mask (Comus),” “Lycidas,” and Paradise Lost. Students are advised to read the last of these before the course begins, as it is quite long.

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Studies
Term 1
MW, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

Modern critics of eighteenth-century British humor tend to see it as harsh, ill-natured, and ruthless. Alexander Pope declared that “the life of a wit is a warfare on earth” and backed up his words with a career of fearless and bloodthirsty satirical slaughter. The drama of the period is frank, bawdy, and populated with unpleasant characters who do not necessarily get any kind of comeuppance; in fact they often thrive. But eighteenth-century humor is not all bitter satire and exploitation. Given the general dislike for excessive seriousness (what was usually called gravity) and the equal popularity of irony in all its forms, humor was seldom altogether absent from any literary works of the period. In this class we will examine what seems to have made people laugh in the eighteenth-century, what literary forms and influences were particularly effective sources of humor, and how notions of what is funny change over the course of the century. We will supplement our analysis with readings on the theory and philosophy of humor. The authors we will read include Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, Laurence Sterne, and Jane Austen.

Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Studies
Term 2
MWF, 10:00 - 11:00 AM

Although many women wrote before the eighteenth century, this age marked the first time that women openly and sometimes profitably wrote for the burgeoning literary marketplace. Beginning with Aphra Behn, widely acknowledged as the “first professional woman writer,” and continuing through a tradition of woman poets, playwrights and novelists, women established themselves as active participants in a world previously reserved for men. Not only did they usually write under their own names (a practice not discouraged until the nineteenth century) but they appealed to a widening world of women readers. This development was not without controversy, and women writers found themselves under increasing pressure to produce the “right” kind of material. Moreover, they belonged to a world in which perceptions of women’s role in British society were transforming, a process in which they themselves participated. On the one hand, the eighteenth century marked the emergence of the first feminist movement, with authors from Mary Astell to Mary Wollstonecraft demanding, above all, greater participation by women in higher education and the professions. On the other hand, conservative men and also women resisted this trend, stressing that the proper place for women was in the home, or what we now call “the domestic sphere.”

In this class, then, we will explore the first great movement of women into public life, along with literary reactions to this revolution by women and men. The texts will span all the major literary genres – plays, poetry and novels – from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen. Evaluation will be based on in-class essays, a major research essay, a final exam and class participation.

Studies in an Eighteenth-Century Genre
Term 1

 During the eighteenth century, Britain transformed from a relatively minor European country to a great economic power with a worldwide empire. British ships ranged the world, sending back reports of new peoples, and setting off a new discussion concerning the nature of “civilization” in contrast with the so-called “primitive” or “barbaric” peoples that British travelers encountered. The use of African slaves in British colonies became a major source of wealth, though this practice also sparked what is arguably the world’s first great humanitarian campaign, the movement to abolish the slave trade. These events had a major impact on eighteenth-century literature, flooding the literary marketplace with travel books and with fictional and non-fictional accounts of far-away places and non-European peoples. This section of English 358 will focus on the many ways that literature of the eighteenth century reflected an expanding world-view, the rise of empire, and a transformed understanding of humanity as comprised of multifarious races, nations and cultures. We will consider the first widely-read literature in English by non-white people as well as the struggles and adjustments precipitated by the rise of Britain as global colonial power. We will proceed chronologically through a selection of texts by Aphra Behn, Mary Rowlandson, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Olauda Equianao and others. Evaluation will be based on a mid-term text, a final essay, an exam, and class participation.

Studies in an Eighteenth-Century Genre
Term 2
TTh, 12:30 - 2:00 PM

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 tragedy, heroic drama, burlesque, and several types of comedy, plays contributed to cultural dialogues on the relative identities of the nation and the individual through such conflicting elements as noble heroics, brilliant wit, political subversion, historical revisionism, and some rather explicit sex. We will consider the ways in which English playwrights and stage practices both echoed and reinscribed ideas of heroic masculinity and femininity, sexuality and marriage, intellectual and passion, violence and its burlesques, as well as the ways in which the dramatic genres of the era embraced both spectatorship and readership and made the political into the (very) personal. Reading ahead? Start with Wycherley’s deliriously witty Country Wife if you want sharp-edged comedy, and Dryden’s All for Love if you want a grand romantic political tragedy about Antony and Cleopatra.

Studies in Romanticism
Term 1
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
The course description for this section of ENGL 359C is not yet available.  Please contact the instructor directly.

Studies in Romanticism
Term 2
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Three decades ago, Fredric Jameson described the emergence of imperial and global networks at the end of the eighteenth century as an event in the history of thought and feeling as well as in political and economic history. In “Cognitive Mapping” (1988), Jameson wrote that the “experience of the individual. . . becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world. . . . But the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life.” The implications of this statement are as much ethical and political as they are intellectual. Especially in the wake of Idle No More and Black Lives Matter, it is imperative for scholars to consider the global stakes of literature—a complexly “subjective” record of “experience” and “truth”—in the Romantic period (approximately 1780-1830.) As Simon Gikandi has put it in Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011), conversations about literature must seek to reconnect “realms of experience that have been kept apart so that they can continue to do their cultural work, separately and unequally.” This course will ask you to consider several questions: how did writers at the turn of the nineteenth century experience (perceive, sense, or intuit) the emergence of global networks? How did they represent, register, or suppress this experience in their work? How can—and how should—twenty-first century readers approach the relationship between early nineteenth-century writing and a world marked by commerce, including the Atlantic slave economy, colonization, empire, and war? As we explore our own answers to these questions, we will read works by writers who explored or travelled, by migrant, emigrant, immigrant, enslaved, and Indigenous writers, and by British writers who spent time imagining connections between themselves, or Britain, and the world.

Early Canadian Writing
Term 2
MWF, 12:00 - 1:00 PM
The course description for this section of ENGL 360A is not yet available. Please contact the instructor directly.

Studies in a Nineteenth-Century Genre
Term 1
MWF, 1:00 - 2:00 PM
This course charts the evolution of poetry in English over “the long 19^thcentury” (from late 18^th C. Romanticism to the mid 20^thC. Modernism), focused on the novel Romantic notion of the self as a capacity to act and speak in the real world according to the otherworldly ideal of absolute freedom. According to the Romantics, having an individual perspective of one’s own isn’t natural, obvious or automatic but an expression of radical freedom, influenced by the historical condition of industrial, democratic modernity but not dictated by divine or natural law.  Instead, in the terms of the preeminent Romantic philosopher Rousseau, a “second nature” binds people together by the “social contract” continually re-negotiated by participants in social life and language.  The Romantics saw reality generally, including the self, as an effect of what is done, thought and said about reality, and they saw poetry and the most profound and expansive means of questioning and revising reality.  This course explores how the idea of using language to assert selfhood and change the world has worked, from its origins in Romanticism through the Victorian and Modernist periods to more contemporary art forms such as the music of singer-songwriters and ‘auteur’ cinema which we will also have occasion to consider.

Studies in a Nineteenth-Century Genre
Term 2
TTh, 2:00 - 3:30 PM

Reading the Victorian novel as a form of geographical placement and identity will be the focus of this course which will begin with ideas of the flâneur  and end with Dracula. The working city, theatrical city, criminal city and utopian city are among the topics with readings in Dickens, Wilkie Collins, R.L. Stevenson, Conan Doyle and George Gissing as we test Ezra Pound’s proposition that “all great art is born of the metropolis.”

Nineteenth-Century Studies
Term A
Online Course

This section of ENGL 364 is offered online. To  see the course description, click here.

This course offers the student the opportunity to encounter and engage with the works of some of the most successful writers of the Victorian period, and to be exposed to some of that period’s central concerns: gender, class, religion and art. These subjects were at the centre of heated tension, so that much of the discourse about them – by politicians, clerics, scientists, novelists and essayists, among others – takes the form of oppositions and power struggles. These basic concerns can be then connected to larger issues of empire, industrialism, individualism, private and public domains, domesticity, religious doubt, decadence, and aestheticism, as seen in a variety of genres. ENGL 364A does not aim to provide a survey of Victorian novels; rather, it focuses on a few select novels to allow for a more in-depth exploration of key ideas and central concerns of the period, as expressed in the form of the novel. The aim of this course is to increase students’ knowledge about Victorian novels and novelists within the context of Victorian culture, and from various critical perspectives. For the purposes of this course, the Victorian period stretches from approximately 1837 (the year of Queen Victoria’s accession) to the last decade of the nineteenth-century, rather than to the beginning of the twentieth-century (1901), when Queen Victoria died.

More information is available via Distance Learning site.

Nineteenth-Century Studies
Term 1
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Why is George Eliot’s Middlemarch, described by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” and recently voted the greatest British novel in a BBC Culture poll, considered to be the quintessential Victorian novel? Why—and how—did Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre become one of the most popular English novels ever written, inspiring successive generations of authors, visual artists, and filmmakers? Why is the first line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet XLIII, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,” so well known when the remainder of the poem, the Sonnets from the Portuguese sequence, and Barrett Browning herself are not? What does A. S. Byatt’s Booker-Prize-winning novel Possession tell us about popular—and academic—notions of Victorian literature and culture?

In attempting to answer these and other literary and cultural questions, we will explore the ideological assumptions—with respect to aesthetics, ethics, gender, class, race, sexuality, religion, politics, education, etc.—implicit in the literary works and in our (and the Victorians’) readings of them.

(Neo-)Victorian novels are not known for their brevity: students are advised to do as much reading as possible before the course begins. Our texts: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World’s Classics); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, selected poems, including Sonnets from the Portuguese (Dover); Christina Rossetti, selected poems, including “Goblin Market” (Dover); George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford World’s Classics); E. Nesbit, “The Prince, Two Mice, and Some Kitchen-Maids,” “Melisande” (UBC Canvas); A. S. Byatt, Possession (Vintage).

Nineteenth-Century Studies
Term 2
MWF, 2:00 - 3:00 PM

In this course we will read, discuss, analyze, and write about nineteenth-century British literature depicting cities and urban spaces.  We will also read theoretical texts (both older and modern) that think through the meaning and symbolic significance of these spaces.  What does the city symbolize for nineteenth-century British culture?  What kinds of utopian hope does it mobilize?  How does the traditional “country-versus-city” dichotomy organize ways of thinking about the possibilities of human life?  What were the impacts of rapid urbanization and industrialization on British culture?  How were these impacts experienced differently by different populations: women, children, marginalized “others,” the poor?  How did the authors of imaginative literature respond to and shape these fundamental questions?  The course texts will be organized around three British cities: London, Manchester, and Bath.

Literary works may include (this is a provisional list subject to change): Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit; Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; and shorter pieces and essays by Henry Mayhew, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Engels, and others.  We will also read a range of modern criticism and theory dealing with cities, urbanization, and critical geography.

Course Expectations: Students are expected to read all course materials and come to class prepared to be active participants.  You will be divided into small study groups that will meet throughout the semester to discuss reading questions (given to you in advance), and will be asked to prepare short written reports on these meetings.  You will also be invited to participate in discussion outside of class time through blog postings and/or a class Facebook page.  Together these activities with constitute your participation grade (20%).  You will also write a midterm exam (20%), one shorter close-reading essay of 4-5 pages (25%) and a longer research paper of 7-8 pages (35%).

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

For many years, people defined modernism in ways which authorized “high” modernism as a period of wild experimentation, avant-garde commitments, difficult texts, and the shock of material considered decadent. No one was sure whether to call these gestures broadly cosmopolitan or elitist—did they produce an inaccessible, hermetic art, unreadable by the masses, or an opening up of convention and platitude to the peculiar and new? What did modernists themselves think that they were producing as members of a creative class? What did they think their work effected in the world? This course places its wager on the sense of opening. High modernism may be a kind of cosmopolitanism of the arts, opening borders between different aesthetic media, traditions, and forms, to correspond with the opening up of the planet’s borders through technologies of speed in movement and communication. We will explore how modernists opened themselves to the world, to its new sensations and affects, and opened the world to itself; we will read a set of aestheticized texts which play with painterly technique, absolute music, and graphic elements, in an experimental reworking of qualities imported from other arts, other cultures and languages, and other places.

Tentative Book List:

• W.B. Yeats, Collected Poems
• Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
• James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Katherine Mansfield, Collected Stories
• Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
• Other materials as supplied on the Canvas course site or distributed in class

Global South Connections
Term 1
MWF, 12:00 – 1:00 PM

With its genealogy in the discourse of the "Third World," the Global South as a critical concept has evolved in the post-Cold War era to encompass a broad range of meanings: from a geographical location on a grid, to a deterritorialized space marked by economic inequality, to a radical imaginary that responds to colonial and neocolonial formations of power. This course will examine literary and cultural networks relating to societies in the Global South, with a focus on the themes of war, militarism, and migration. We will examine texts that engage histories and speculations of North-South divides in regions such as Vietnam, North and South Korea, and the U.S. South, paying particular attention to intra-Asian and Afro-Asian connections among these regions. How have authors represented wars, forced migrations, and survival in these spaces? How does literature reckon with the unresolved legacies of militarism and carcerality in the South? How do these texts map South-South relations and negotiate multiple intersections of race, sexuality, gender, environmentalism, etc.? Exploring these questions, we will examine a range of creative genres (e.g. fiction, autobiography, film, poetry) that take up the issue of Global South connections. Authors we will study may include Bao Nihn, Han Kang, Krys Lee, Omar El Akkad, Toni Morrison, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and others.

World Literature and Social Movements
Term 2
TTh, 12:30 - 2:00 PM
The course description for this section of ENGL 377A is not yet available. Please contact the instructor directly.

This course will introduce first-year MA students to graduate-level research procedures and professional practices. Our meetings will take the form of seminars and guest lectures that will cover a range of topics. Research- and course-related topics will include applying for grants, building bibliographies, practices of annotation and citation, archival research, and conceptualizing and writing a Master's thesis. Professional topics, such as how to present at conferences and how to apply for PhD programs, will also be covered.

There is currently no description available for this section of ENGL 500

Studies in the History of the English Language
Term 1
Tuesdays, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.

"I'll look it up in the dictionary!" Peeking into the "Black Box" behind OED, DARE, DCHP & Co.

In this seminar we explore the highly interesting but comparatively less-widely known sphere of dictionary making. While everybody uses some dictionary in some form, who knows how these tools, often seen as authoritative and "the law", are made? We will discuss all major English dictionaries in ways that recast the history of the English language as well as of dictionary making. This knowledge we will use to address in our essays questions as diverse as the following:

1. What role, if any, did the Grimm Brothers have in bringing about the Oxford English Dictionary in 1857?
2. Why is the Dictionary of American Regional English, a monumental work few have heard about, considered the best dictionary for geographical variation?
3. Which dictionaries are Webster dictionaries?
4. When did the F-word enter English dictionaries and how did that come about?

Lexicographical questions such as the four above can be studied from a qualitative-philological point of view, from a quantitative-linguistic one, or a combination of both. The short answers to the four question above are offered below*, while the long answers are potentially some of your essays. This means that in this seminar students may try their hands at a method novel to them (quantitative) or prefer to further hone their qualitative research skills in the exciting and slightly weird world of dictionary making in English (or other languages, e.g. in the context of bilingual dictionaries).

Those who have special ties to or an interest in a particular language may wish to embed it within the English dictionary tradition. For example, someone with a connection to Hindi might be interested in the Oxford English-Sanskrit dictionary tradition ("the Hobson-Jobson"), or those with an interest in First Nations Studies might want to take a critical and post-colonial look into a dictionary compiled by English missionaries in the Canadian west, for which we are "at the source" at UBC, as the H. Rocke Robertson Collection at UBC Archives is one of the world's finest dictionary collections. As the Collection is located in Ike Barber, we will make ready use of this resource, which should be especially appealing for those among you with an interest in archival work. Ever seen a first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary from 1755? We'll look at and analyze it, as we will for a 1604 "Cawdrey", which is generally considered the "first" English dictionary. There is, of course, always the option to write on Canadian English lexis and lexicogrpahy or on the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (e.g. Avis et al. 1967, Dollinger & Fee 2017), for which UBC is the best spot to work from.

Since there generally seems to be a widespread interest in word etymologies, we will use this seminar also to teach the basic tools on how to tell "fish from fowl", that is how to tell a non-sense etymology from a meaningfully plausible one. To that end, we will use the (very nice) textbook by Philip Durkin, OED's chief etymologist, to teach us the ropes of etymological research, which will, in turn, help us explore the fascinating and most often unexpected histories of words, such as silly (originally meant "blessed"), Lord (meant the "warden of the bread") or Lady (meant "she who kneads the bread"), which allows nice insights into cultural and societal practices of yesteryear. And who knew that Canuck and Austrian German Kanake 'foreigner (derogatory)' are one and the same with quite different meanings? These are just a few examples of the power of doing etymology "right".

A term paper will be written on an aspect of English lexicography and related languages – be it an aspect of a dictionary's history or the history of a given word or semantic field. No linguistic knowledge is presumed. All graduate students are warmly welcome to come aboard this "word-y ride".

* Answers: a) via "dictionary envy" about the Grimms' Deutsches Wörterbuch from 1838, b) the curse of lexicography, c) only Merriam-Webster's dictionaries, though "Webster" is also synonymous with any dictionary in the US, d) 1972.

Core literature

• Brewer, Charlotte. 2007. Treasure House of the Language: The Living OED. Yale: Yale University Press. (Chapters 2 & 7)
• Landau, Sidney. 2001. Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. 2^nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Chapter 2)
• Considine, John. 2003. Dictionaries of Canadian English. Lexikos 13: 250-270.
• Durkin, Philip. 2011. The Oxford Guide to Etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Durkin, Philip (ed.) 2015. The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (selected chapters)
• Gilliver, Peter. 2016. The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press (chapters 1, 12 & 13)
• Glowka, Wayne. 2008. How the American Dialect Society choose its Words of the Year. Dictionaries 29: 23-34.
• McConchie, R. W. 2012. “Her words had no weight”: Jane Austen as a lexical test case for the OED. Dictionaries 33: 113-136.

Further literature (subject to changes, including reference sources)

• Avis, Walter S., Charles Crate, Patrick Drysdale, Douglas Leechman, Matthew H. Scharill and Charles L. Lovell (eds). 1967. A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. Toronto: Gage. Accessible in digital form at www.dchp.ca/dchp1
• Caudle, James J. 2011. James Boswell (1740-1795) and his design for A Dictionary of the Scot[t]ish Language, 1764-1825. Dictionaries 32: 1-32.
• Considine, John. 2003. Dictionaries of Canadian English. Lexikos 13: 250-270.
• Considine, John. 2012. Elisha Coles in context. Dictionaries 33: 42-57.
• Dollinger, Stefan. 2015. National dictionaries and cultural identity: insights from Austrian German and Canadian English. In: The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography, ed. by Philip Durkin. Oxford: Oxford University Press (590-603).
• Dollinger, Stefan (chief editor) and Margery Fee (associate editor). 2017. DCHP-2: The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, Second Edition. With the assistance of Baillie Ford, Alexandra Gaylie, and Gabrielle Lim. Vancouver: University of British Columbia. www.dchp.ca/dchp2
• Gilliver, Peter. 2011. Harvesting England’s ancient treasure: dialect lexicography and the Philological Society’s first plans for a national dictionary. Dictionaries 32: 82-92.
• Hancher, Michael. 2010. Illustrating Webster. Dictionaries 31: 1-45.
• Hausmann, Franz J., Oskar Reichmann, Herbert E. Wiegand and Ladislav Zgusta (eds.). 1989-91. Wörterbücher: Dictionaries: Dictionnaires: An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography. 3 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Landau, Sidney. 2001. Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. 2^nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Lo, Katrina. 2012. (Re)Defining the “Eh”: reading a colonial narrative in the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. Unpublished MA thesis, UBC Department of English.
• Lovell, Charles J. 1955. Lexicographic challenges of Canadian English. Journal of the Canadian Linguistic Association 1(1, March): 2-5.
• Minkova, Donka and Robert Stockwell. 2009. English Words: History and Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Murray, K. M. E. 1977. Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Ogilvie, Sarah. 2008. The mysterious case of the vanishing tramlines: James Murray’s legacy and the 1933 OED Supplement. Dictionaries 29: 1-22.
• Reed, Joseph W. Jr. 1962. Noah Webster’s debt to Samuel Johnson. American Speech 37(2): 95-105.
• Sledd, James and Wilma R. Ebbitt. 1962. Dictionaries and that Dictionary: a Casebook on the Aims of Lexicographers and the Targets of Reviewers. Chicago: Scott, Foresman.
• Starnes, DeWitt T.  and Getrude E. Noyes. 1946. The English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1604–1755. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
• Stein, Gabriele. 1985. The English Dictionary Before Cawdrey. Tubingen: Niemeyer.
• Robertson, H. Rocke and J. Wesley Roberston. 1989. A Collection of Dictionaries and related Works illustrating the Development of the English Dictionary. Vancovuer, BC: Unviersity of British Columbia Press.
• Zgusta, Ladislav. 1971. Manual of Lexicography. The Hague: Mouton.

Requirements:

Practice research assignment, 10%
Student research presentation, 10%
Student literature presentation, 10%
Research Paper, 50%

Participation (in class and outside)

Studies in Rhetoric and Theory of Composition
Term 2
Tuesdays, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.
This seminar counts for STS credit.

Pain is not a diagnosis, or even a medical object: it is an experience, with problematic relations to language, to identity, and to sympathy. It challenges speech and it challenges persuasion; pain is, in other words, in part, a rhetorical phenomenon. This course will take up topics in the rhetoric of pain, including, for example, the following: pain and suffering; pain and affect; pain and addiction; pain and health inequities; pain and stigma; pain and disability, pain and gender. Through investigations prompted by the course, students will have a range of theoretical approaches and methods at hand when they read accounts of pain, literary and nonliterary, or when, in fact, they experience pain or (to borrow from Susan Sontag) they regard the pain of others.

Chaucer
Term 2
Thursdays, 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

“Of hem that writen ous tofore/ The bokes duelle”

At the opening of his Confessio Amantis, John Gower reflects on the role of old books in informing the present, and the future. Gower is thinking in part about the contents of those old books - the stories, histories, and exempla that informed his work - but he is also, like many medieval poets, highly conscious of the impact that a manuscript culture, with all the variation in transmission that implies, has for his poetic project. Chaucer reflects similar concerns, chiding his scribe Adam, for example, for failing to copy Troilus and Criseyde faithfully. As for Thomas Malory, his favourite phrase is “as the French book saith,” a tic that reflects his mining of French romance for the details of his Morte Darthur, and that also reflects a question that has puzzled scholars for years: how did a “knight prisoner” actually access all the physical books he would have needed in the writing of his Morte?

In this course, we will explore texts by Gower, Chaucer, and Malory, in the context of their manuscript (and early print) history. We will make use of facsimiles to relocate texts we encounter today in modern scholarly editions, into their many “original” contexts (and we will have to think through what, exactly, “original” might mean). Seminar participants will receive hands-on training in late Middle English paleography and codicology. Our theoretical lens will be book-historical, as we read examples of materially-inflected criticism of Middle English texts. The course will include work in Rare Books and Special Collections.

Middle English Studies
Term 2
Mondays, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Dowload full description & Readings

This seminar confronts the problem of an untenable disconnect between the language of the church and the language of the people by tracing the biblical sources and language of several late medieval English dramas. In an age when both worship is performed and Scripture is heard in Latin, a language that most people did not understand, English drama plays a central role in religious education and expressions of piety for the laity. Often staged in celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi, cycles of pageants re-enact sacred history from Creation to the Last Judgment. Together in this course we ask, what gets lost, added, or emphasized in the translation from Biblical narrative into popular entertainment? After reading a wide selection of plays from the Corpus Christi cycle and the Saints or Conversion plays (using Bevinton’s anthology), each student will select individual plays for further analysis (using individual critical editions). In the first half of this seminar, students will trace the sources and analogues for each play analyzed, asking how the biblical narrative is adapted for enactment in the medieval pageant.

Just as students trace plot developments, they will also examine biblical language as it is rendered from Scripture into popular entertainment. While the clerics responsible for the script of certain plays relied on the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible (available online), laity may have known the Middle English Bible (edition by Cooper) which used to be attributed to the Lollards (school of Wycliffe). By comparing and contrasting the two versions of each biblical source, students will explore the extent of English familiarity with the Bible. By comparing and contrasting sources with pageants, students will identify the literary strategies (e.g. narrative structure, stereotyped characters, humor, anachronism in contemporary setting – as explicated by Kolve, colloquial diction) employed in the vernacular drama. Student research will show how the use of colloquial spoken English plays a key role in the adaption of biblical material for the medieval stage (or pageant cart).

In the second half of this seminar, students will situate the English dramas in larger cultural context. Using the work of Duffy and Pfaff, students will familiarize themselves with the centrality of liturgy in the English Middle Ages. While scholars like Beckwith and Lee have examined medieval theater as enactments of liturgical drama or as “Sacramental theatre,” students will contribute original research by asking how the Middle English language of the plays, which they have elucidated, factors into particular aspects of religious and social life during the period of their performance.

Prerequisite: While a working knowledge of Middle English (ME) would be ideal, a willingness to immerse oneself in this late medieval language (practically Early Modern English) is all that is necessary.

Texts are glossed with Modern English equivalents and explanatory notes are provided in the edition ordered for class.

CourseRequirements: Students will lead a seminar meeting on their research and submit a 20 page paper on that research due at the end of the term (worth 75% of total mark). In addition to their required participation in class, students will be responsible for leading a discussion of the reading assignment for at least one class meeting (worth 25% of mark).

See full description for Readings

Studies in the Renaissance
Term 1
Wednesdays, 11:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.

Recent turns in English Studies in general, and in Renaissance Studies in particular, have us refocusing our attention away from the representation of human experience in order to think about the vitality of objects, animals, environments and other non-human entities. This act of reorientation asks us to think about what is and what is not proper to human experience – a critical and scholarly exercise that, in some ways, is not unlike the project embarked upon by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Our purpose here will be, in the first instance, to connect the writing of an author central to post-renaissance notions of “the human” to some of the intellectual, scientific, colonial and theological investments of the early modern period associated with the rise of humanism. With this understanding in mind, we will move on to explore the places in Shakespeare’s work in which the contours of the human become less obvious, paving the way for contemporary theories of the posthuman.

Shakespearean texts will include: The Sonnets, Venus and Adonis, The Taming of the Shrew, Merchant of Venice, Richard II, Titus Andronicus, Othello, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Theoretical texts will include key texts of Renaissance Humanism as well as foundational work on Posthumanism (specific texts to be posted later in the summer).

Students are asked to read/reread Hamlet before the term begins.

Studies in the Renaissance
Term 2
Tuesdays, 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
mark.vessey@ubc.ca

NEW (ENGLISH) WORLDS OF LEARNING: WRITING THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF KNOWLEDGE, 1500-1700 

Following a well-marked modern tradition of taking Francis Bacon’s call for “the general state of learning to be described and represented from age to age” as inaugural for a new intellectual discipline, Peter Burke begins the “Timeline” in his 2016 book What is the History of Knowledge? with Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605). Responding to Burke—and to the general upsurge in scholarly interest, since Foucault, in the history of knowledge—this course seeks to place Bacon’s initiative in a broader context of insular British and Anglophone retrospects on and projections of worlds of learning, beginning with Thomas More’s Utopia (Latin 1516, English 1551) and including Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (written ca. 1580, first printed 1595) and John Milton’s Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, to the Parliament of England (1644). We will use those three works, along with Bacon’s Advancement and his New Atlantis (posthumously published in 1627), as a introductory course in the stakes and styles of the speculative and polemical construction of alternative cognitive regimes, paying special attention to (1) the division of fields or kinds of learning, (2) the claims advanced for each kind, (3) the arguments and circumstances adduced to explain the fact or necessity of significant change over time. Then, in the second part of the term’s work, which will extend into individual research projects in the history of knowledge, we will attempt to bring these (and, as appropriate, other) putatively “early modern” accountings into relation with late twentieth- and early twenty-first century narratives of the onset of something like (or less than?) an early modern “knowledge revolution.” Participants in the seminar will be free to choose their own test-cases for this second phase of work from an imaginary bookshelf that would include the titles listed below. They will be expected, as part of their research and presentation to the group, to study at least some aspects of the critical reception of the study in question.

The seminar should be of value to students with a vocation or avocation for science and technology studies or the history of the book, as well for those with interests in literature and religion, literature and science, and/or in the abiding issues of power/knowledge.

• Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin. L’apparition du livre. 1958. [The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800. 1976.]
• Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. 1962.
• Michel Foucault. Les mots et les choses. 1966. [The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1970.]
• Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations. 1979.
• Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. 1986.
• Anthony Grafton. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. 1992.
• Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern. 1993.
• Lisa Jardine. Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print. 1993.
• Adrian Johns. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. 1998.
• Peter Harrison. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. 1998.
• Peter Burke. A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot. 2000.
• James Simpson. 1350-1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution. 2002.
• Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, eds. Early Modern Science. 2006.
• Stephen Greenblatt. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. 2011.
• David Wootton. The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution. 2015.

Studies in the Eighteenth Century
Term 1
Fridays, 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

During the eighteenth century, as emergent capitalism transformed social relations in Britain (and elsewhere), a strange thing happened to scarcity. It changed from a kind of event that happened occasionally when crops failed or supply was disrupted (and was usually explained by divine providence) to the organizing condition of economic and cultural life. “Where production and distribution are arranged through the behavior of prices,” Marshall Sahlins observes, “and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity”; “Inadequacy of economic means is the first principle of the world's wealthiest peoples.” All human activity under the law of scarcity is governed by the need to choose what we can afford and give up what is foreclosed by our choices. For Karl Marx, the law of scarcity defines a key contradiction of capitalism: superabundance/overproduction leads to “an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity…. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence.” Unlimited productive capacity is the cause of dearth and impoverishment.

That kind of scarcity has often been called artificial or socially-produced scarcity. Natural scarcity, by most accounts, has been around longer, but began accelerating with the rise of capitalist industrialism and its resource depletions. But the eco (from the Greek oikos — household) in economics and the eco in ecology suggest a conjunction between the two fields of study that troubles the natural/social distinction. Indeed the earliest ecologists (Linnaeus, Gilbert White) thought of themselves as economists of nature. In a wide-ranging set of readings, we will investigate the complex interrelations between political and natural economy in the eighteenth century and consider their applicability to more recent eco-critical discussions. We will attend to the ways in which literary and non-literary discourse reacts to, resists, or helps to naturalize the new order of things, and the ways in which nature itself is drawn into and reshaped by the new politics of shortfall and allocation. From the mercantile visions of Daniel Defoe and the literary- marketplace romances of Eliza Haywood to the aesthetics of Edmund Burke, the post-feudal elegies of Oliver Goldsmith and George Crabbe, and the romance revival Ann Radcliffe, our reading will pursue the development of the politico-economic system in which socially produced insufficiency, resource exhaustion, and speciecide can be defined as natural occurrences. We will also read eighteenth-century economic and political theory by David Hume, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Hannah More, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Arthur Young, and Thomas Malthus, along with critical and theoretical work by Sahlins, Marx, Reginia Gagnier, Timothy Morton, Jason Moore, George Bataille, Lyla Mehta, and others.

Studies in the Eighteenth Century
Term 2
Mondays, 12:00 - 3:00 p.m.

 Imagining the Other in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Ethnicity, Race and Nationhood, 1660-1800

During what we call the “long eighteenth century,” Britain became the center of the first modern empire spanning from North America to India to Australia. The nation itself was cosmopolitan to a degree that may surprise us. There were some ten-thousand people of African origin in England; as the heart of a trading empire, London was so filled with different ethnic groups that Joseph Addison, standing in the Royal Exchange, imagined himself “a Citizen of the World.” Colorful myths of foreign peoples stemming from the Middle Ages gave way to a proliferation of first-hand travel accounts, while visitors from Africa, the Americas, and the South Seas became well-documented curiosities. The slave trade, fueled by domestic addictions to sugar and tobacco, reached its peak. Yet slavery increasingly met with resistance from abolitionism, the first great humanitarian struggle in the Western world. In this seminar, we will explore some of the main facets of opening Britain to the wider world through various kinds of literature – plays, poems, novels – and also a range of other kinds of documents – travelogues, scientific investigations, political/economic tracts.  We will cover as wide a range of ethnicities as possible in a short course: our materials will concern indigenous Americans, Africans, Turks, Indians, and South Sea Islanders. The goal of the course will be reach conclusions, however complex and ambivalent, about how Britons achieved a sense of their own national and “racial” identity through the course of global expansion and increased contact with the “Other.” We will also see how literature, science and politics adjusted to the cultural paradoxes and strains brought about by imperialism, colonialism and ramifying ethnic diversity.

Texts:

• Modern scholarship on the idea of “race” and its history
• Aphra Behn, Oronooko and Southerne’s dramatic adaptation (1692)
• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Turkish Embassy Letters (1717-18)
• Montesquieu, Persian Letters (1721)
• Robert Rogers, Ponteach; or the Savages of America (1766)
• Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (1774)
• James Cook, Journals
• Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life of Gustavas Vasa (1789)
• Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799)
• William Wilberforce, An Appeal to the…Inhabitants of the British Isles (1823)
• Anon., A Woman of Colour (1808)
• selected poetry

Studies in the Romantic Period
Term 2
Wednesdays, 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

The period that in literary studies we still call the “Romantic” (roughly 1780 to 1830) also saw significant developments in mathematics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, physics, and biology. Indeed, it has been suggested that it was in this period that, thanks in large part to the rapid implementation of steam technologies in all sectors of the economy, science entered its modern phase. Fields that had been, to that point, concerned with verifying the compatibility of observed data with the subjective perspectives and needs of theorists (and their patrons) were, by the end of the eighteenth-century, becoming increasingly conscious of the ways that natural phenomena frequently overwhelmed subjectivist criteria, dislodging the human observer from its position of privilege. While there was some pushback against this “objectivist” turn, most philosophers, poets, novelists, and critics understood its radical implications for a general understanding of the relationship between the human “in here" and the world “out there” and sought ways to envision and formalize what this new relationship might look like. By way of literary, scientific, critical, and (some) theoretical readings this course will invite students to consider what our own historical and philosophical understanding of this turn means for the way we read not just Romantic works but literary aesthetics more generally, how, that is, the history of science can contribute to our own observations on and experiments with literary form, critical technique, and post-humanist politics. We will read a range of Romantic works, mainly poetry and fiction from both canonical and lesser-known writers. We will also work through a number of recent critical and theoretical interventions in the “literature and science” debates and consider their applicability to Romantic literary studies.

Studies in the Victorian Period
Term 1
Tuesdays, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

This seminar will situate five canonical works of fiction in relation to the mid- and late Victorian print cultures that produced them: Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Oscar Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates. Working with copies of the earliest publications (available in Rare Books and Special Collections and/or in my personal collection), we will explore how the material form and publication of a work – including whether it was first published serially or in its entirety and the ways in which publishers targeted particular types (sometimes classes) of readers – affected the reading experience. What difference does it make to read Bleak House in nineteen monthly parts, with each instalment of Dickens’s text preceded by Hablot K. Browne’s (Phiz’s) illustrated cover, the “Bleak House Advertiser,” and two (four in the final double number) Phiz plates, or in the first edition with Phiz’s illustrations interspersed throughout the volume? Or Middlemarch in eight parts (with advertisements and decorated wrappers) or in the four-volume first edition? How does reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the first edition, for which the placement of John Tenniel’s illustrations was carefully planned by both Tenniel and Carroll, influence the interpretation of the text? What effect does the format of The Graphic: An Illustrated Weekly Newspaper – its folio-size pages, high-quality illustrations, and emphasis on news stories – have on reading the serialized Mayor of Casterbridge, illustrated by Robert Barnes? How does this experience differ from reading the heavily revised, unillustrated novel one volume at a time as borrowed from a lending library? How do the material aspects of A House of Pomegranates – for example, the binding, the cover design, and the illustrations by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon – help to define the volume as a work of the Aesthetic movement and/or as a collection of fairy tales?

Because four of our five texts are illustrated we will discuss Victorian ways of seeing as well as Victorian ways of reading. We will also explore how one of our texts, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, functions in relation to twentieth- and twenty-first-century print/visual culture, discussing a selection of illustrated editions in RBSC’s “Alice 100” collection, as well as – depending on the interests of the seminar participants – screen adaptations, e-books (e.g., “Alice for the iPad”), and various manifestations of Alice as 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.

While discussing the literary works in relation to print culture will be central to our seminar, we will also explore other aspects of our texts. Students will be encouraged to give presentations and to write papers on any topics of interest raised by these works.

Please read before term begins at least one of our two longest texts, Bleak House and Middlemarch, paying attention to their serial structure. First editions of all five texts are available on the Internet Archive; the Bleak House parts (bound together to produce the first edition) are available through Project Boz and the Graphic is available through UBC Library (we will be discussing both the serial text and the first-edition text of The Mayor of Casterbridge). If you would like to have print copies for ease of reading and annotation, I recommend purchasing the Oxford World’s Classics Bleak House and Middlemarch and the Penguin Mayor of Casterbridge, and printing the Internet Archive Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Macmillan, 1866) and A House of Pomegranates (Osgood, McIlvaine, 1891).

Studies in the Twentieth Century
Term 2
Fridays, 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

“There are two ways of going beyond figuration … either toward abstract form or toward the Figure. Cézanne gave a simple name to this way of the Figure: sensation. The Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation; it acts immediately upon the nervous system, which is of the flesh, whereas abstract form is addressed to the head and acts through the intermediary of the brain, which is closer to the bone.”           --Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (trans. Daniel W. Smith), p. 31.

In 2018, the Modernist Studies Association invited submissions to its conference under the rubric of “Graphic Modernisms.” This not only suggests the growing ascendency of graphic design during the period (the term itself was coined in Modernism’s annus mirabilis, 1922), but also the general pressure which Modernism as an aesthetic and intellectual movement put upon figuration. Arguably, the most important “going beyond” was of the idea of the real itself, as the century took thought about how to manage its own hermeneutic suspicion. In The Cambridge Companion to Modernism Michael Bell speaks of a “living synthesis of different world conceptions…held together in a … mutually testing relation” (12). This course explores seminal and recent work on the Figure in Modernist style in relation to its materialisms and politics, its cross and intermedia, its global travels, and its cultural histories, and tries to come to some conclusions about the lasting effects of Modernism’s crisis of representation on consciousness. Perhaps the Figure can even help us to reimagine the Subject.

Primary texts include Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Pound, H.D., Barnes, W. Lewis, Beckett, and some European modernists in translation, such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Kafka. You will be asked to listen to selected music recordings and to view art images available in digital archives, on course reserve, or in the reference department. Also: Wittgenstein, Adorno, Deleuze, Lyotard, Massumi, Huyssens, Margot Norris, Daniel Albright, et al.

Requirements:

• 20% -- Lead one seminar discussion on an assigned reading.
• 20% -- Submit two brief written critical reflections on assigned readings (10% each).
• 60% -- Research/critical essay

Studies in Canadian Literature
Term 1
Wednesdays, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

See Course Site

Writing In Catastrophic Times, the philosopher Isabelle Stengers describes what she names  "the felt necessity of trying to listen to that which insists, obscurely" in our world. Around climate change, political and social upheaval, indigeneity and diaspora, displaced populations and globalization, Stengers notes the emergence of a widespread human imperative to attend to our fractured world by enacting a multisensory, multimodal version of what has been called the “auditory turn.” By learning to listen carefully, with critical acuity, to recent developments in contemporary Canadian poetry and poetics, we will investigate how current writers address this imperative. After some engagement with theories and critical approaches focused on listening, we will examine in detail the work of six poets (drawn from, among others, Jan Zwicky, Robert Bringhurst, Ken Babstock, Karen Solie, Lorna Goodison, George Elliott Clarke, Fred Wah, Anne Carson, Gregory Scofield and Elise Partridge) with an ear to the complexities and challenges their writing presents. Members of the seminar will also have space to pursue the writing and thought of other North American poets of their choosing. Our aim will be to trace the specific ways in which contemporary sound and auditory texture impact on and are also impacted by the verbal or textual arts.

Studies in Postcolonial Literature
Term 1
Tuesdays, 10:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

The description for this seminar is not yet available. We hope to post it in the coming weeks.

Studies in Postcolonial Literature
Term 2
Thursdays, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.

The description for this seminar is not yet available. We hope to post it in the coming weeks.

Studies in Literary Movements
Term 2
Wednesdays, 2:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Although the orality vs. literacy binary has often been invoked as a structuring device in the discussion of Indigenous writing, recent work by scholars like McCall, Martin, and McLeod has challenged this convention, decolonizing it through the development of approaches rooted in Indigenous epistemologies, poetics and law as well as in the study of Indigenous oral histories.  This seminar will begin with an overview of the traditional binary and then focus in more detail on recent decolonial theoretical approaches.  We'll discuss several examples of oral histories, considering some of the techniques used to bring spoken words to the page and some of the issues arising including practices of transcription, translation and the use of graphic and poetic devices on the page.  We'll conclude with a consideration of the fortunes of oral history in the courtroom and contrast settler law with Indigenous legal traditions in relation to stories.

Studies in Literary Theory
Term 1
Thursday, 2:30 - 5:30 p.m.

Recent ecocritical (and other) theory has taken as a central task the dismantling of the instrumentalist view of the relationship between nature and humankind. Such challenges can be roughly divided into two groups: 1. Heideggerean approaches such as speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (Meillassoux, Harman, Morton) that posit a radically unknowable object which “withdraws” not only from human epistemological mastery but also from other objects; and 2. Spinozist-Deleuzean approaches such as new/vital/feminist materialisms that centralize matter as opposed to object and favor models of complex systems of relations such as networks and flows. Both sets of approaches are committed to a radical de-centering of human subjectivity and agency and an ethically driven emphasis on nonhuman actants.

In this seminar we will read focus on works from the second camp — recent feminist and gender theory that challenges the linguistic and ontological turns in philosophy by arguing for the ireduceability of the material world.  We will accompany this reading with plenty of context: authors from the first camp as well as readings from the longer history of feminist theory and criticism.  While we will do the occasional illustrative literary reading, this is primarily a theory course, and is appropriate for graduate students in any discipline wishing to deepen and extend their understanding of this important body of criticism.

The course will be divided into the following sections (subject to change!):

1. Precursors in feminist theory: fromécriture feminine to Butler;
2. From cyborg feminism to assemblage theory;
3. OOO and its discontents;
4. Grappling with Darwin; and
5. Queer/trans/of color critique of the critique

We will read the following authors (this is a partial list also subject to change!): Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Sara Ahmed, Jordy Rosenberg, Mel Chen, Alexander Weheliye

Studies in Literary Theory
Term 1
Mondays, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.

What does it mean to think, speak, and write about “Asia” from our location here at UBC (and in an English department as well)? If large-scale migrations from across the Asia Pacific have played a key role in the post/colonial development of the West Coast, then attempts to theorize Asia from here are enmeshed in questions of empire, capital, and racialization. As Naoki Sakai has argued, "Asia" is not a self-evident or coherent concept, but rather the product of a modern "cartographic imaginary" based on the systemic, if illusory, distinction between the West and the Rest. With this insight in mind, this seminar explores ways of thinking about "Asia" as a geopolitical entity, socio-economic construction, and cultural formation. The course will revolve around two critical fields: Asian Canadian critique and inter-Asia critique. Our goal will be to place them in conversation with each other, with particular attention to our disciplinary location in English literary studies. Our final classes will attempt to put these ideas into practice by taking up several “cases” that call for comparative and transnational methodologies as a way of developing strategies for our own critical work. Class discussions will be supplemented by visits to local neigborhoods, arts events, and galleries, as well as dialogue with guest speakers.

Assignments will include an in-class presentation, a book review, presentation responses, and a term paper.

Tentative Readings (please contact the instructor in August if you’d like an updated reading list):

Dipesh Chakrabarty, _Provincializing Europe_
Kuan-hsing Chen, _Asia As Method_
Grace Cho, _Haunting the Korean Diaspora_
Iyko Day, _Alien Capital_
David Eng, _The Queer Feeling of Kinship_
Larissa Lai, _Slanting I, Imaginging We_
Roy Miki, _Redress_
Yoshimi Takeuchi, _What is Modernity?_
Wang Hui, _The Politics of Imagining Asia_

Shorter pieces by Lee Maracle, Harry Harootunian, Kojin Karatani, Renisa Mawani, Smaro Kamboureli, and others.

Studies in Literature and the Other Arts
Term 1
Thursdays, 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
This seminar counts for STS credit.

New technologies emerged in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries that transformed conceptions of time, space, and the self, influencing the form and content of fiction. Trains, and later automobiles, allowed for rapid travel; electricity illuminated cities, altering perceptions of the relations between night and day; the telegraph enabled instantaneous, seemingly incorporeal, communication across distances; sound recording and radio delivered disembodied voices. In this seminar, we will consider the ways in which technologies of communication, perception, transportation, industry, and recording altered the culture and shaped literary texts. We will examine emerging technologies as they are represented in literature, and consider the effect of new technologies such as the train, the telegraph, the phonograph, wireless, and the motion picture on the form of narrative from the mid-nineteenth century into early modernism. Topics discussed will include technology and consciousness, technology and perception, industrialism and the environment, globalization and imperialism, technology and the supernatural (psychic studies, spiritual telegraphy, ghost photography), automata and technology and the body.

Assignments and Other Requirements

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

Texts will include:

PRIMARY

• Charles Dickens, “The Signal Man,” Dombey and Son
• Samuel Butler, “The Book of the Machines”
• George Eliot, “Shadows of the Coming Race”
• E.M. Forster, “The Machine Stops”
• Rudyard Kipling, “Wireless,” “Mrs. Bathurst.” “Deep Sea Cables”
• Vernon Lee, “The Motor Car and the Genius of Places”
• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism”
• Karl Marx, from Capital
• T. Stead, “Wireless Telegraphy and Brain Waves”
• H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
• Virginia Woolf, “The Searchlight,” “The Cinema”
• Israel Zangwill, “The Memory Clearing House”

SECONDARY (selections from)

• Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body
• Nicholas Daly, Literature, Technology, and Modernity
• Douglas Khan, Noise, Water, Meat
• Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks
• Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey
• Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television