Courses

In this course we’ll read a selection of short stories from the last 200 years or so. We’ll be especially concerned with narrators, perspectives, and the relationship of description to story-telling. Students will have the opportunity to practise essay writing and research skills.

Required Text: The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, 8^th edition.

Haunted Houses

“What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.” – The Devil’s Backbone (dir. Guillermo Del Toro)

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

Texts:

Core texts include a small selection of public-domain short stories (to be announced) Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger; Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching; and The Others (dir. Alejandro Amenábar); possibly another film; as well as Gardner and Diaz, Reading and Writing About Literature (5th edition). Through readings in current criticism and theory, we will develop strategies for textual analysis in literary and cultural studies. We will also consider the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reaching a “fixed” or consensus reading of any text.

Course Evaluation:

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

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

Focused on literary texts in their critical and theoretical contexts, ENGL 100 is a course in academic writing that fulfills the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing Requirement.

This course offers an introduction to literary studies and the disciplines of academic reading and writing. In additional to the assigned texts, we will be reading essays and scholarly articles in order to introduce students to different critical approaches. This section’s theme is about American literature of the 20^th century, and we will consider how various texts attempt to grapple with such historical events as the aftermath of World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and the Cold War.

Texts:

Texts are likely to include John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, short fiction from Liberation Day by George Saunders, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Joan Didion’s Democracy.

This course is designed for students interested in the discipline of English literary studies and aims to cultivate in students the practice of reading and writing about literary texts. We will cover the basic concepts and vocabularies of literary criticism, and familiarize ourselves with the central forms and genres of literature—poetry, plays, and prose—and the specific methods involved in analyzing them. We will ask not just what the meaning of a literary work is, but how meaning is conveyed, and why it is conveyed in such a way. That is to say, we will look at the formal elements of a text and the way they interact with, reinforce, or subvert a text’s thematic content. Additionally, we will learn about the conventions of essay writing and how to write good prose. Texts to be studied may include a variety of poems, William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus; Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan, and Nella Larsen’s Passing.

Focused around literary texts in their critical and theoretical contexts, ENGL 100 is a course in academic writing that fulfils the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing Requirement.

In this section of English 100 we will study a selection of poetry from the Renaissance up to the present (see the provisional list below).  Since one purpose of the course is to introduce students to literature’s various critical approaches, we will also examine scholarly articles (available online) on some of the assigned poetry.  In both their proposal for the research essay and the essay itself, students will be expected not only to offer their own interpretations of a poem not discussed in class, but also to cite, demonstrate their familiarity with, and above all respond to a minimum number of secondary sources.  Ideally, then, this course will teach students the skills they need to write research essays in upper-level English courses.

Course requirements: two in-class essays (each worth 15%), proposal for research essay (15%), research essay (25%), final exam (30%)

Texts: The Broadview Introduction to Literature: Poetry, 2nd edition (Broadview); Reading and Writing about Literature: A Portable Guide, 5th edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s)

A provisional list of poems: Shakespeare, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”; John Donne, “The Flea”; William Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper”; Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”; W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”; T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”; Adrienne Rich, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”; Margaret Atwood, “Death of a Young Son by Drowning”; Jackie Kay, “In My Country”

Storying Conflict: Narrative in Canadian Literary Contexts

According to narratologist H. Porter Abbott, “the representation of conflict in narrative provides a way for a culture to talk to itself about, and possibly resolve, conflicts that threaten to fracture it (or at least make living difficult).” In an increasingly polarized, fractured, and wounded world beset by crises both global and local, Canada remains, as it has always been, a space of multiple conflicts. This section of ENGL100 will focus on contemporary Canadian and Indigenous literatures, exploring works in multiple genres (short stories, short film, poetry, a novel, and life writing) that share an interest in turning to narrative and storytelling as creative spaces to ask the hard questions and explore conflicts. Some of our texts will take on conflicts that are public and political: pandemic, climate change, medical ethics, (neo)colonialism, racism, and inequity, among other concerns and injustices. Others explore the intimacies of private crises over relationships, identity, responsibilities, family, grief, belonging, and community. Most, in fact, do both. Approaching literature as an art where private life and public history merge, we will turn to a variety of Canadian texts to investigate how conflict—whether personal, communal, national, and/or global in scale— structures narrative. How and why do writers narrate conflict? What does literature offer to the difficult conversations prompted by conflict and crisis? How do different forms and genres of writing function to engage readers in these conversations? We’ll take up these and other questions prompted by narratives that invite us to consider the ways literature engages dilemmas, embraces uncertainty, opens debate, entertains ambiguity, asks “what if?”, and locates hope.

N.B.: The texts we will read emerge from Canadian contexts and narrate lived and imagined experiences that ask us to critically consider, among other things, the politics of history, identity, gender, sexuality, colonialism, race, diaspora, multiculturalism, belonging, nationhood, land, Indigeneity, and ecology. Please be aware that some readings openly address material from these contexts that can be challenging, including racial, colonial, and gendered violence.

About ENGL100 and Course Objectives

ENGL 100 is a writing-intensive introduction to English literature and language studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts, and is recommended for students intending to become English majors. In lectures, workshops, and group activities with peers, we will work on developing the skills needed to think critically, read inquisitively, and write persuasively about literary texts. You will learn and practice methods of textual analysis, research, and essay composition. Special focus will be placed on learning the foundations of narrative theory and cultivating the skills of close reading, with particular attention to the relationship between form and content in literary texts. By the end of the course, you will (a) be familiar with a range of narrative forms and literary genres used by contemporary authors in Canada; (b) understand some of the cultural, political, historical, and theoretical contexts that inform these literatures and their interpretation; (c) appreciate the ways form and style shape content to produce meaning in literary texts; (d) understand how to find, evaluate, and use research in literary criticism; and (e) have facility with academic essay-writing in the English discipline.

Why Fairy Tales Still Matter

“People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.  We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” (Greta Thunberg)

When Greta Thunberg spoke of fairy tales at the UN Climate Action Summit, she used the term in a way that dates to at least the 1740s—to refer to a deceptive, idealized fantasy that ignores the harsher realities of life. But is that characterization entirely fair? And what, exactly, is a fairy tale anyway? Why do some remain popular even two or three hundred years after they were first published? And why do modern writers so often return to the form, sometimes to rewrite old tales and sometimes to compose brand-new ones? In this course, we will address these questions by reading and discussing a variety of classic tales by the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont as well as modern versions of those tales by Emma Donoghue, Francesca Lia Block, and Donna Jo Napoli. We’ll end the term by examining a graphic novel by Bill Willingham in which fairy tale characters figure prominently. In lectures and discussions, we’ll consider how fairy tales have been adapted to meet the needs of different historical periods, and how different critical approaches to the same text can yield entirely different—even competing—interpretations.

A writing-intensive introduction to language and literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. Fulfills the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement. Open only to students in the Faculty of Arts. Recommended for students intending to become English majors. Essays are required.

In this writing-intensive introduction to language and literary studies, we will look at how literary artists themselves think about literature, something they often reveal when they place themselves in line with (or in opposition to) previous texts and traditions. We will read 3 clusters of texts that allow us to explore ideas of writing in, and writing back. Our first cluster is built around a medieval literary figure who has also been persistently fascinating to modern audiences, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. We will read selections from Chaucer (in translation), alongside two modern poetic responses (by Jamaican poet Jean “Binta” Breeze and British poet and spoken-word performer Patience Agbabi), as well as the very recent play by British writer Zadie Smith, called The Wife of Willesden. Our second cluster begins with the tradition of “carpe diem” poetry as reflected in some of its most iconic poems, by Christopher Marlowe, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Donne, and then considers how early modern poetry like this is refracted and repurposed in the Oji-Cree writer Joshua Whitehead’s 2017 poetry collection Full-Metal Indigiqueer. Finally, we will read William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and consider two very different reimaginings of the play, the first a 1968 Royal Shakespeare Company theatrical production (filmed and available complete on YouTube) that vibrates with the energy of 60s pop culture, and the second, Neil Gaiman’s retelling as part of his monumental graphic novel series, The Sandman. A range of readings and scaffolded assignments throughout the term will offer you the tools to think through how and why literature works - when, where, and for whom.

Storying the Social Self:  Life Narratives of Artists and Their Communities

What role does storytelling play in the development of the private and public self?

We all share stories or even imagine ourselves as the audience for our internal meditations.  We share life experiences through conversations, email,  social media, and other forms of communication.  Many of us write about our experiences in diaries or journals to track our lives, record travel, work out problems, and find solutions.  More importantly, we often find special connections and inspiring points of commonality by reading writers who disclose their inner lives through public platforms such as autobiography, literary essays, confessional poetry, Youtube vlogs, or music videos.

In this section of English 100,  we will read fiction, memoir, poetry, and a graphic novel that explore the development of a creative persona that often resists social restrictions.  The narrators of these coming-of-age life narratives confront and challenge oppressive social judgements and restrictions based on class, gender, race, and normative embodiment.

In addition to the primary readings, we will study theories of narrative and scholarly research on life narrative across genres.  You will acquire research knowledge in life narrative studies and practice essay writing skills in the interdisciplinary fields of English language and literature studies. Secondary readings that demonstrate interdisciplinary approaches to life narratives will be available as e-texts through the UBC library.

Required readings will include the following:

• Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women (Penguin Modern Classics)
• Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (NeWest)
• Maria Campbell, Halfbreed (Penguin Random House)
• David Chariandy, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (Penguin Random House)
• Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis, Volume 1 (Pantheon)

Selections from the following E-Texts available through the UBC Library:

• Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Second Edition (Cambridge UP 2008).
• Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography:  A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Second Edition (U of Minnesota P, 2010).

Books and Friendship

Aristotle says, “Without friends no one would choose to live, though they had all other goods.” Friendship claims to exist upon a principle of perfect equality. It promises a private intimacy free from masquerade and convention; only a friend knows and loves your “true portrait,” proposes Montaigne. But what would a cultural history of friendship show? Is modern friendship a different kind of thing than friendships in the past? Could you have a friend at first sight, or briefly, or must a friendship be built with labour over time? Is group friendship possible? Can friendship be erotic or romantic? This course thinks about “two [or more] going together,” exemplary and distinctive friendships in fiction, in drama, in poetry, in life.  We consider topics including friends as companions, friends and self-growth, friendships with animals, philosophy of friendship, heroic friendships, queer and romantic friendships, friendship and the nation, doomed and difficult friendships. Writers include Ursula Le Guin, Nella Larsen, Samuel Beckett, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Kazuo Ishiguro.

Mad Science: An Introduction to Criticism

This course offers an introduction to the skills of literary criticism. Our theme is mad science, a concept we will explore by reading a handful of literary works, ancient, modern, and contemporary. Each of these works raises important questions about the relations between scientific knowledge and human culture more generally. Examples of these questions include: What are the relations between scientific knowledge and power? How should we understand the relations between scientific practice and the emotions? What are the consequences, both for humankind and for nonhumans, of scientific invention? In addition to these and other questions, we will discuss critcism itself as science or technical knowledge.

We begin with Aristotle's Poetics, one of the most influential books of literary criticism, which will help us define terms for our course. We move to Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, an ancient Greek tragedy that describes the fate of the god Prometheus who is punished by Zeus for teaching humans how to use fire and other basic arts. We continue with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818), which tells the story of a scientist who creates a technology (the Creature) that is sentient and intelligent; Shelley's novel becomes the template for many subsequent treatments of the urge to create and control life. R.L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), like Shelley's novel, has been enormously influential for twentieth- and twenty-first century readers, as it sets forth a basic theme of (the scientist's) dual personality. Finally, we conclude with Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) and its narrative of a group of young men and women in a dystopian near-future. We will explore each of these texts in their critical, historical, and theoretical contexts, reading secondary sources that will help us to understand these texts and serve as examples of literary criticism.

The course will be taught as a mix of lecture and classroom discussion.

Literature of the First World War: Comparative Approaches

English 100 offers a writing-intensive introduction to the discipline of literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical contexts: it focuses on foundational skills in literary analysis and scholarly research. This section highlights fiction and poetry inspired by the First World War (1914-1918). We will read writers from different countries (Britain, America, Canada, and Ireland) and distinct generations (participants and descendants). In particular, we will examine selected poems (1918) by Wilfred Owen; and three novels, namely The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway; The Wars (1977) by Timothy Findley; and A Long Long Way (2005) by Sebastian Barry. The issues of trauma, mourning, memory, and history shaping modern and contemporary controversies on war and society will organize our studies of celebrated texts. Critical readings and audio-visual materials will guide our conversations. Students will develop analytic and synthetic skills in reading and writing about language and literatures through the investigation of relevant contexts, formal features, and academic discourses. In addition to several writing assignments, the requirements for this course may include a final examination.

Growing Up New : Reading the Contemporary African Bildungsroman

Why has the bildungsroman, the coming-of-age narrative, been such a dominant part of post-independence African writing? Do children witness large-scale social changes in radically new ways?  What does the genre tell us about the pressures shaping young African subjects? And what possibilities might the genre allow for?

In this course we’ll turn to a range of texts from the African continent that explore the complexities of growing up in rapidly changing societies. From the darkly comic Zambian film I Am Not a Witch, to J.M. Coetzee’s sly, pseudo-autobiographical Boyhood, we’ll encounter a wide range of stories that challenge the idea of what “growing up” means on the world’s “youngest” continent.

Other texts include (subject to change):

• Tsitsi Dangarembga – Nervous Conditions
• Binyavanga Wainaina – One Day I Will Write About This Place
• Short Stories by Diriye Osman and Pravasan Pillay, among others

This course offers a writing-intensive introduction to the disciplines of literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. The course fulfils the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement and is open only to students in the Faculty of Arts. The course is recommended for students intending to become English majors. Essays are required.

The readings, organized broadly according to genre, may include the following:

Short Stories

• Edgar Allan Poe, "The Casque of Amontillado" (1846)
• James Joyce, "Araby" (1914)
• William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily" (1930)
• J.D. Salinger, "The Laughing Man" (1949)
• Donald Barthelme, "Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby" (1987) and "The Baby" (1987)

Novel

• Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918)

Personal Narratives

• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an American Slave (1845)
• Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook" (1966)
• Octavia Butler, "Positive Obsession" (1989) and "Furor Scribendi" (1989)

Poetry

• Benjamin Hertwig, Slow War (2017)

Drama

• Sophocles, Antigone (441 B.C.)

Assignments and Procedures:

Our main activity will be to practice the art of interpretation and close reading. Each student will be asked to deliver a short (five-minute) informal presentation: "Open the book, read something aloud, make an observation or formulate a question--discussion will follow." Our writing assignments will be based on a similar procedure, namely to let our writing flow up from our reading. Students will be expected to make notes in their books (underlining passages of interest or fascination, marking key images, collating scenes and pages, mapping internal relational patterns, and so on). Students will also write three short essays (one in class) based on close reading of a literary text. There will also be a final exam. Classroom conversation will be encouraged. Attendance will be taken.

Focused around literary texts in their critical and theoretical contexts, ENGL 100 is a course in academic writing that fulfils the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing Requirement.

In this section of English 100 we will study a selection of poetry from the Renaissance up to the present (see the provisional list below).  Since one purpose of the course is to introduce students to literature’s various critical approaches, we will also examine scholarly articles (available online) on some of the assigned poetry.  In both their proposal for the research essay and the essay itself, students will be expected not only to offer their own interpretations of a poem not discussed in class, but also to cite, demonstrate their familiarity with, and above all respond to a minimum number of secondary sources.  Ideally, then, this course will teach students the skills they need to write research essays in upper-level English courses.

Course requirements: two in-class essays (each worth 15%), proposal for research essay (15%), research essay (25%), final exam (30%)

Texts: The Broadview Introduction to Literature: Poetry, 2nd edition (Broadview); Reading and Writing about Literature: A Portable Guide, 5th edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s)

A provisional list of poems: Shakespeare, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”; John Donne, “The Flea”; William Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper”; Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”; W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”; T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”; Adrienne Rich, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”; Margaret Atwood, “Death of a Young Son by Drowning”; Jackie Kay, “In My Country”

Writing Trans Resistance

In a time of relentless and direct attacks on transgender people and transgender rights, transgender people have continued to write into the storm. This class will explore the ways in which trans writing has been and can be a companion in struggle. Looking at poetry, prose, political writing, and memoir from the 20th and 21st centuries, we will learn about different representational strategies in historical perspective, and formulate our own conceptions of what resistance and solidarity looks like now. We will read broadly across aesthetic forms, as well as from works of political-economic theory, transgender theory, legal analysis, and manifesto. Authors will include jos charles, Kai Cheng Thom, Jules Gill-Peterson, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Treva Ellison, Leslie Feinberg, C. Riley Snorton, Susan Stryker, and Casey Plett.

Gay Shakespeare

Our focus in this seminar is the topic of homosexuality in the literary history of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. We’ll want to investigate why – and how – readers and scholars of these love poems have, for centuries, approached (or avoided) the plain fact that the vast majority of them are about the speaker’s deep emotional investment in a beautiful young man. The critical reception of the Sonnets affords us the opportunity to reflect on the aesthetics and politics of reading for sexuality in literature, which always entails considerations of gender, race, and social class. It also always changes with the times.

Our primary reading will be Shakespeare’s 154 poems. We’ll contextualize them with biographical, historicist, and theoretical accounts of sexuality. We’ll call on Oscar Wilde and Rufus Wainwright to help us think about adaptation, fandom, and remediation. We’ll think hard about evidence. And we’ll consistently engage with the difficulties in reading and writing about poetry.

There are several short writing assignments and a final research paper. There is no final exam.

Focused on literary texts in their critical and theoretical contexts, ENGL 100 is a course in academic writing that fulfills the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing Requirement.

This course offers an introduction to literary studies and the disciplines of academic reading and writing. In additional to the assigned texts, we will be reading essays and scholarly articles in order to introduce students to different critical approaches. This section’s theme is about American literature of the 20^th century, and we will consider how various texts attempt to grapple with such historical events as the aftermath of World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and the Cold War.

Texts:

Texts are likely to include John Berryman’s Dream Songs, Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, short fiction from Liberation Day by George Saunders, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Joan Didion’s Democracy.

Focused around literary texts in their critical and theoretical contexts, ENGL 100 is a course in academic writing that fulfills the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing Requirement.

In this section of English 100 we will study a selection of poetry from the Renaissance up to the present (see the provisional list below).  Since one purpose of the course is to introduce students to literature’s various critical approaches, we will also examine scholarly articles (available online) on some of the assigned poetry.  In both their proposal for the research essay and the essay itself, students will be expected not only to offer their own interpretations of a poem not discussed in class, but also to cite, demonstrate their familiarity with, and above all respond to a minimum number of secondary sources.  Ideally, then, this course will teach students the skills they need to write research essays in upper-level English courses.

Course requirements:

• two in-class essays (each worth 15%)
• proposal for research essay (15%)
• research essay (25%)
• final exam (30%)

Texts:

• The Broadview Introduction to Literature: Poetry, 2nd edition (Broadview)
• Reading and Writing about Literature: A Portable Guide, 5th edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s)

A provisional list of poems: Shakespeare, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”; John Donne, “The Flea”; William Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper”; Christina Rossetti, “Goblin Market”; W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”; T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”; Adrienne Rich, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”; Margaret Atwood, “Death of a Young Son by Drowning”; Jackie Kay, “In My Country”