2022 Summer

Reading Humans in Nature

In this section of ENGL 110, we will read, think, and write about literature that explores the human experience of being in nature and among non-humans. Several questions will guide us in this work: how do humans and non-humans figure, interact, or mesh in these texts? What relations and differences between the human and non-human do these literary works grapple with, define, or deconstruct? How does language come to shape these relations? Spanning multiple genres (fiction, poetry, drama) and two centuries (1818-2018), our literary selections will include works by Mary Shelley, Emily Dickinson, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Camille Dungy, Joy Harjo, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and Matthew McKenzie, among others.

The renowned writer of weird fiction H.P. Lovecraft famously claimed that “the true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule” – rather “a certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present.” This section of English 110 will consider drama, poetry, and prose fiction that meets these criteria: stories of monsters, demons, unfathomable horrors, metaphysical mystery, and cosmic awe. We will examine the ways that “weird” literature evokes emotions of wonder, fear, and disgust while engaging with political, social, and philosophical questions, interrogating boundaries, norms, and categories. Beginning with theepic poem Beowulf, a blood-soaked tale of monster-hunting in a world governed by a cruel, inhuman fate or “wyrd,” we will trace the literary history of the weird, following it through the fallen, omen-haunted tragedy of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s eerie poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” and Christina Rossetti’s sensuously malevolent “Goblin Market,” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s chilling tale “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The course concludes with a consideration of twentieth-century weird fiction, including the short stories of Angela Carter and Octavia Butler and the novel The City & The City by China Miéville.

Through the study of selected examples of poetry, fiction, and drama, this course will introduce students to the fundamentals of university-level literary study, and furnish them with the skills to think and write critically about literature.  Students will be taught the basic concepts of genre and form in literature and methods of literary analysis in order to prepare them for future courses (in English and other disciplines) which require close reading, critical thinking, open discussion, and analytical writing.  The emphasis in this section will be on Canadian authors and their works.

Each student is expected to participate fully in all class activities (reading, writing, discussion, groups, etc.).  Each student will write three essays (in-class and home), keep a Response Journal, and sit the Final Examination.

Attendance:

Because English 110 is conducted as a participatory, hands-on course, regular and punctual attendance is mandatory.  To succeed in this course, students must attend every class, on time, and well prepared, participate co-operatively in group work, and consistently contribute to the initiating and sustaining of small-group and class discussions.  Please register for this course only if you are able to make this commitment.

Required Texts:

• Custom Course Pack of selections from Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, 2nd Canadian ed., edited by Kirszner, et al. (Nelson)
• King, Thomas.  Green Grass, Running Water (HarperPerennial)
• Various handouts

Optional Text (If You Do Not Own a Good Handbook of English which Contains Updated [2016 or 2021] MLA Formatting Style):

• Aaron, Jane E., and Elaine Bander. The Little, Brown Essential Handbook, 6th Canadian ed.  (Pearson)

This three-unit course has been compressed into a brief six-week format.  The readings are extensive.  It is, therefore, recommended that you pre-read the novel.

Contact the instructor

Zombies. Otherness, and Global Capitalism

The figure of the zombie has taken over twenty-first century popular culture, from AMC's smash hit The Walking Dead (2010-2022) to the most cutting-edge scientific advancements in the realm of brain transplants which are making the boundaries between life and death ever-murkier. The story of a dead corpse returning from the grave, often part of a larger story of a zombie apocalypse, has been a productive (we might even say viral) site for cultural critique; the zombie narrative speaks to broad questions about otherness (in terms of race, colonialism, and nationhood) as well as economy (in terms of consumerism and capitalism), while the zombie apocalypse as a whole raises questions about our connections with one another in the modern world, from contagious disease to globalization, sustainability to intergenerational trauma. This course will explore a range of genres on the topic of the zombie; we will study a series of novels, films, and poetry on the zombie in order to examine the figure as a way into questions about identity, otherness, and danger. Examining this genre will provide students with an introduction to literary analysis at the university level. Students will develop the skills necessary to think critically and argue effectively on a variety of literary texts (broadly understood) through a combination of lecture and discussion.

Content Warning: Please be advised this class will engage with texts and films that convey graphic scenes of violence and gore.

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This section of English 110 will introduce students to basic elements of university-level literary study by examining a wide range of works in three genres: poetry, prose fiction, and drama. These works are of various literary eras and by authors from diverse cultural backgrounds. Students will be taught methods of literary analysis that should enable them to read each work with care, appreciation, and (one hopes) enjoyment.

two in-class essays: 20% each
home essay (1000 words): 30%
final exam: 30%

Text: Lisa Chalykoff, Neta Gordon, Paul Lumsden, eds. The Broadview Introduction to Literature: Concise Edition, 2nd ed. (Broadview, 2019)
A Provisional Reading List

POEMS: Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”; Ezra Pound, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”; Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz”; Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”; Adrienne Rich, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”; Margaret Atwood, “Death of a Young Son by Drowning”; George Eliot Clarke, “Casualties”; Jackie Kay, “In My Country”; Karen Solie, “Nice”

SHORT STORIES: Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”; Chinua Achebe, “Dead Men’s Path”; Alistair MacLeod, “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun”; Alice Munro, “Friend of My Youth”; Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings”; Thomas King, “A Short History of Indians in Canada”; Kazuo Ishiguro, “A Family Supper”

PLAYS: William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night; Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House

Words to Change the World

This course poses some fundamental questions about reading and writing literature: Why read? Why write? Why study literature? Does literature offer us a way to make sense of—or even change—the world? Students will tackle these questions by discussing literary texts and completing assignments that introduce university research and writing practices.

Rather than looking at reading and writing as unchanging acts, we will think about them as practices that are shaped by and help to shape different cultural, political, and artistic moments across history. We will consider how authors have thought their work could fight social evils like slavery, racism, sexism, capitalist exploitation, and environmental destruction. Different authors at different times have held contrasting views of literature’s role in the world – from those who insist that reading and writing are essential for political liberation to those who lament literature’s powerlessness in the face of life’s absurdity. Course texts include Frederick Douglass’s anti-slavery novella The Heroic Slave, Samuel Beckett’s “tragicomedy” Waiting for Godot, and a selection of contemporary and classic poetry and short stories.

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This course focuses on selected English writers of poetry, drama, and prose from the 14th to the late 18th centuries. The following literature will be studied: The General Prologue in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales; Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; selections from John Milton’s Paradise Lost; Part 4 of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. 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%
• Research 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 Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Broadview), Second Edition The texts will be available at the UBC Bookstore in a specially priced, shrink-wrapped package.

This Fiction Called Canada - Readings in Poetry, Prose, and Place

Our course takes the national space of Canada as a point of critical entry for the study of contemporary fiction, poetry, cultural studies, and critical theory. As we share the space of the classroom each week, we will collectively map routes to understanding our positions, more specifically, in the city we call Vancouver and in so-called Canada. We’ll look at the city and its suburbs around us, whether we are home or away, and at the built environments extending from our classrooms and desktops to study our own production of space. Taking seriously our course title, we will analyze and interrogate our meeting point on unceded xwməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory. Our class will always meet in person. But given that so many of our educational sites have shifted online in recent semesters, we can consider how in the case, and space, of a virtual classroom, this ‘sharing’ raises ever more compelling stakes.

Our class offers opportunities for me to learn from students quite literally where you’re at, drawing on our unique spatial experiences of Vancouver and territories beyond. We will take every chance to get out into the city together, shifting the space of the classroom and dancing away from our desktops!  We’ll start by practicing close reading but pull this analysis off the page too, studying site-specific artwork as a research method for urban space. Our interdisciplinary reading list will include oral texts, speculative fiction, noir, biotext, historical fiction, narrative film, experimental poetry, and some texts that explore the blurriness of boundaries between forms and genres. Among these, we will engage politics and power struggles as textual imperatives enlivened by our own discussions, activities, and writing. The course objective will be to develop relationships between literature and Canada--as a social space--as two distinct, but overlapping, projects.

African Cities in the 21st Century: A Literary Approach 

This summer course introduces students to questions of  urbanism, identity, and power in the rapidly-changing metropolises of 21st century Africa. Through novels, film, poetry and short stories, we’ll encounter and challenge preconceived notions of Africa by asking how cities shape modern African life.

From the eerie, ghostly Dakar of Mati Diop’s 2019 film Atlantics, to the decaying sprawl of Ivan Vladislavic’s Johannesburg in 2011’s Double Negative, we’ll interrogate what defines and defies the “global” African city through questions of labour, gender, and race. With Teju Cole’s 2011 Open City, we’ll ask what makes New York and Brussels fundamentally African spaces, and debate how histories of migration shape these global centres today. Short stories and poetry from Windhoek, Harare, and Cape Town consider how African cities provide new kinds of communities, shape new identities, and offer glimpses into both the past and the future of the continent.

MODE OF DELIVERY: ONLINE, ASYNCHRONOUS

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MODE OF DELIVERY: ONLINE, ASYNCHRONOUS

This course is an introduction to the sentence structure of English and to the use of grammar in various communication situations differing in register, dialect or mode. A characteristic of English grammar is that it is flexible – users can and do adapt grammatical structures according to their communicative requirements. This is true of spoken language ranging from, for instance, everyday informal conversation to formal presentations and in written language from informal uses in notes or text messages to formal papers. The dialect of the speaker or writer affects the grammar, too. By studying numerous examples across more than one regional dialect of contemporary (present-day) English usage, the course explores some of the prominent uses to which grammar can be put.

Grammar is often defined as a set of rules for the use of language. The approach followed in the course is descriptive. This implies that the course teaches how grammar is used in real situations, rather than how some or other authority (like a professor of English language, an institution for the regulation of language, or a prescriptive textbook) prescribes that it should be used. This does not mean that there are no rules in this course; rather that the rules reflect how language users actually tend to use the language.

The English 321 course begins by identifying types of grammatical units, describing their internal structure and relating them to larger structures and determining their meaning in the context in which they occur. The grammatical units are presented as a hierarchy in which each unit is composed of one or more of the units below it in the hierarchy. Words consist of one or more morphemes, phrases consist of one or more words and clauses consist of one or more phrases. The course systematically describes the following levels of grammar: morphology, word classes (or parts of speech), phrase classes and the structure of clauses.

Full description available at https://distancelearning.ubc.ca/courses-and-programs/distance-learning-courses/courses/engl/engl321/

MODE OF DELIVERY: ONLINE, ASYNCHRONOUS

Contact the instructor

MODE OF DELIVERY: ONLINE, ASYNCHRONOUS

“Author’s pen” and “Actor’s voice”: Shakespeare in Text and Performance

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

Mapping Romantic Vancouver

Working at the crossroads of literary studies with theories and practices of settler land use such as extraction, agriculture, urban design, and cartography, this course examines the sedimented history of British Romanticism (the literatures, especially poetry and poetics, of the period 1770-1840) in settler colonial place-making on the traditional and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and Səl̓ílwətaʔ peoples. In our work together, we will use close reading and deep mapping methods to investigate the continuing but little considered role of Romantic quotations, names, and tropes in what Tiffany Lethabo King has named the “white cartography” of what is currently known as Vancouver. We will deeply engage the “crisis of representation,” as King calls it, that ensues when these practices, and the violent histories they depend on and imperfectly conceal, encounter peoples and histories that cannot be subsumed or erased. We will meet alternately on the UBC Vancouver campus and at a series of relevant sites in the city and surrounding region. Readings will include novels by Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and John Richardson, poems by James Grainger, Phillis Wheatley Peters, William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, and Pauline Johnson, and prose by James Cook, Thomas De Quincey, and Olaudah Equiano.

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

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

“Vampires do exist” – Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Whether we take Edith Cushing or Abraham Van Helsing at their word, the 19th-century Gothic revival certainly emphasized possibilities for terror and horror in tales of the supernatural. However, these interventions of spectral and un-dead beings often take place in the recognizable present; they speak to its anxieties. Perhaps they speak to ours as well, given our recent fascination with Neo-Victorian representations of the 19th century, such as Penny Dreadful, From Hell, Crimson Peak, etc. We will examine stories addressing issues of gender and sexuality; class, race, and culture; realism and the supernatural; urban and rural settings, all in a century known for developments in science and technology (especially photography), social upheaval, and a veneer of respectability, yet with monsters lurking in closets and under beds. Our focus will also permit consideration of the boom in publication of popular literature in a variety of formats, as well as the rise of the professional writer during the 19th century.

Core texts include Margaret Oliphant’s The Library Window, Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and short fiction very likely including M.R. James, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”; Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Old Nurse’s Story”; Charlotte Riddell, “The Open Door”; Sheridan LeFanu, “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street”; R.L. Stevenson, “The Body Snatcher”; E. Nesbit, “John Charrington’s Wedding” and possibly a couple of Victorian werewolf stories (since werewolf stories feature prominently in the research done for both Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s infamous Dracula). A page of links to the short stories is in the Notes and Course Materials Module on our Canvas site, as well as a link to the Project Gutenberg edition of Carmilla.

Evaluation will be based on two essays, a take-home final exam, and participation in discussion in class and on the course’s Canvas site.

Please keep checking my blog for updates: https://blogs.ubc.ca/drgmbaxter/

MODE OF DELIVERY: ONLINE, ASYNCHRONOUS

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

English 392 is a 13-week course that will guide you in the study and approaches to some classic Western texts and approaches to children's literature. The focus will be on British fantasy literature, by authors such as Gaiman, Tolkien, Pullman and Rowling, but we will also explore some connections with texts from other cultures. Our fully asynchronous course is part of the English Online Minor program in the Department of English Language and Literatures, but is open to English majors and to students in other programs such as Education, Language and Literacy, and Library and Information Studies. You will be reading novels, short stories and scholarly articles on children's literature throughout this term, and you will be sharing your ideas both formally, in the form of essays, and informally, in the form of discussion posts, peer reviews and games.

“And the winner is . . .”: The 2021 Canadian Scotiabank Giller Prize Shortlist

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

“As much as each prize is an institution unto itself, it also crystallizes a variety of other consecrating forces and actors, from the publishers who select and promote a title to the authors who blurb it and the reviewers who praise it.”  -- Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath, & J.D. Porter

In this class, we will discuss the five fictional works shortlisted for Canada’s 2021 Giller Prize: Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise, Angélique Lalond’s Glorious Frazzled Beings, Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia’s The Son of the House, Jordan Tannahill’s The Listeners and Miriam Towes’ Fight Night. We will consider the institutional components of the Giller Prize (evaluation criteria, selection of judges, procedures for submission & selection, history, past recipients) as well as what Manshall, McGrath & Porter refer to as the “consecrating forces and actors” which influence literary awards. In addition to writing a critical essay on one of the texts, students will participate as a jury member in an in-house “Fiction 2021” award committee to choose our own winner from the 2021 Giller shortlist.

Horror/Science: Gothic Echoes in Science Fiction

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

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

This course is not about slick shiny optimistic visions of the future. It’s also not about magical and supernatural creatures (even if some of its characters might resemble them). It’s not about science research that has vastly benefitted worlds and their inhabitants: it’s about bizarre singular passion projects and their progeny, about science gone wrong, about the byways of pseudoscience and paranormal investigations. We will examine the theoretical bases of contemporary approaches to the Gothic and apply them to various examples of fiction and film. The text list will be finalized in the spring, but the foundation texts will be Frankenstein (1818 edition), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and possibly The Island of Dr. Moreau. We will also examine a few modern/contemporary novels (possibilities include but are not limited to I Am Legend, The Haunting of Hill House, Black Sun Rising, The Passage, Gideon the Ninth) and one or two films (again, possibilities include but are not limited to Alien, Ex Machina, Blade Runner, Underworld, Annihilation).

I will request that the UBC Library put Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle and the edited collection Gothic Science Fiction 1980-2010 on reserve and will request that Gothic Science Fiction 1818-Present be ordered (preferably in an online version).

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a seminar presentation, a formal research paper, contribution to discussion both in class and on the course’s Canvas site, introduction of a relevant critical/theoretical work and a primary text not on our finalized reading/viewing list, and a take-home final reflection essay.

Please keep checking my blog for updates: https://blogs.ubc.ca/drgmbaxter/

Studies in the Romantic Period
Term 2
TR, 1000 AM - 100 PM

Mary Shelley’s classic novel about the technological engineering of a person has itself engendered radically new ways of conceiving and propagating personhood. Critical discourses like posthumanism, methodologies like media studies, and practices like virtual reality, social media, video games and viral communication are anticipated by this self-consciously prophetic work whose historical relevance seems uncannily only to increase over time.  We will use the novel as a springboard to consider an array of texts from prehistory to the present, across domains including theory, fiction, poetry and film. We will also use Frankenstein’s farflung pedigree and progeny to re-focus Romanticism and the treatment of procreative technology in other Romantic period writing.  Besides recent posthumanist and media theory, we will focus on variations of the myth of Prometheus and story of Adam and Eve in horror and sci-fi literature and film.  In the spirit of the novel, this seminar is an experiment, exploring an eclectic selection of texts to see what sparks are generated, and students are encouraged to suggest additions.

Studies in Commonwealth/Post-colonial Literatures
Term 1
MW, 1000 AM - 100 PM