Courses

Literary Criticism: A Sleepwalker’s Guide

What is “literary criticism” and how is it related to political and social life? What do English professors do when they’re not teaching? How and why do we constantly invent new ways to talk about old books?

This course offers students a chance to preview and practice the research and writing skills that go into upper-year and graduate-level studies in English literature, by studying one text over the entire semester: Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. At the centre of the text is our guide and sleepwalker, Robin Vote, who carves a path of loss and independence through multiple lovers. Jeanette Winterson’s preface to the 2008 New Directions edition of Nightwood calls it “a bleak picture of love between women” (xi), though since being published in 1936, it has been read by successive generations of scholars as an example of many different kinds of writing: carnivalesque, gothic, psychoanalytic, metafictional, modernist, postmodernism, lesbian, posthuman. Surveying key trends in the scholarship on one novel will help us question the ways that literature maps onto life: What happens when a fake doctor, a trapeze artist, and a baron haunted by the past walk into a bar?

Our semester-long study of Nightwood will foreground its many critical contexts and consider several key ideas about modernism and modernity along the way. The course is writing intensive, and the assignments – which include critical peer responses – will build step-by-step towards a required final essay. We will practice finding and analyzing secondary sources through the UBC Library and participate in structured in-class discussion often. Sleepwalkers are, of course, welcome.

Required Text: Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood. New Directions, 2008.

Between You and I: Exploring Selfhood in Contemporary U.S. Literature

What makes ‘you’ you? How does the ‘I’ in speech and writing relate to the living person? How do markers of identity and belonging come alive in the space between ‘you’ and ‘I’? This course asks how poets and fiction writers experiment with language to explore selfhood and relationality. Far from the unique expression of individuality and interiority, writers are preoccupied with how our sense of self is shaped by politics, conceptions of nationality and citizenship, and the imprint of mass media. In this course, we will explore these topics through contemporary American writing that comments on life under late-stage global capitalism. Guided by close readings of texts by Patricia Lockwood, Claudia Rankine, and Ling Ma, we will consider how writing can provide solace and sublimity faced with compounding crises of familial loss, state violence, and pandemic apocalypse. These authors variously track the effect of globalization, racial capitalism, and state governance on our social, psychic, and political lives. They do so by creatively deploying different literary genres and forms—from the confessional lyric, to the social media prose poem, to the speculative fiction novel.

This course will also introduce students to the basics of academic research and writing, with an emphasis on how to make arguments about literature. With reference to secondary readings on our three main authors, we will take up different stylistic approaches to writing about poetry and prose, including: book review essays, academic literary criticism, and collaborative research clusters. Together, we will engage in conversations about texts in their social and political contexts and ask what writing can do –to express relations of self and other, to build critical consciousness, and to make a world that is liveable.

Required Texts: Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This (2021), Claudia Rankine, Citizen (2014), Ling Ma, Severance (2018)

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.

Core texts include Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger; Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching; and The Others (dir. Alejandro Amenábar), 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.

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

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

INSTRUCTOR: SHARPE, JAE

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 late 20^th century (from approximately 1950 to 2001), and we will consider how various texts attempted to grapple with such historical events as the aftermath of World War II, the Civil Rights movement, the Cold War, and the development of nuclear weapons.

Texts are likely to include Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son,Sam Shepard’s Buried Child,  and selections from Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Franz Wright’s Ill Lit, and Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

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.

Primary texts will include the following:

• Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
• Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In our writing assignments (short essays, a final exam) and classroom discussions we will practice the art of interpretation and close reading.

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 site of struggle and a space of multiple conflicts. In this section, we will explore contemporary Canadian and Indigenous literatures in multiple genres (short stories, poetry, a novel, and life writing) that share an interest in turning to literature and storytelling as creative spaces to ask the hard questions and explore conflicts. Some of these texts take on challenges that are public and political: pandemic, climate change, medical ethics, (neo)colonialism, racism, and inequity, among multiple other concerns and injustices. Others explore the intimacies of private crises over relationships, identity, responsibilities, family, belonging, and community. All, 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 different ways literature engages dilemmas, embraces uncertainty, opens debate, entertains ambiguity, asks “what if?”, and locates hope.

Want to get reading this summer? Start with Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves.

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 the disciplines of literary 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.

In this section of English 227 we will study an assortment of short stories by authors of various nationalities and historical eras. After briefly exploring reasons for the emergence of the modern short story we will proceed chronologically by examining short fiction written over the span of roughly a century, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.  Apart from identifying each story’s literary elements, we will note how it may reflect one or more literary movements: for instance, realism.  How to define the term “short story” is a question that will almost certainly arise from our close study of so broad a range of short fiction.

The short stories we study in the course will be selected from the following list:

Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”; Guy de Maupassant, “The False Gems”; Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; James Joyce, “The Dead”; Franz Kafka, “Metamorphosis”; Katherine Mansfield, “The Garden Party”; Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”; Chinua Achebe, “Dead Men’s Path”; Alice Munro, “Friend of My Youth”; Alistair MacLeod, “As Birds Bring Forth the Sun”; Raymond Carver, “Cathedral”; Margaret Atwood, “Happy Endings”; Thomas King, “A Short History of Indians in Canada”; Kazuo Ishiguro, “A Family Supper”; Jhumpa Lahiri, “Interpreter of Maladies”; Hassan Blasim, “The Nightmare of Carlos Fuentes”; Madeleine Thien, “Simple Recipes”

Text: The Broadview Introduction to Literature: Short Fiction, 2nd ed. (Broadview)

Course requirements: two quizzes, each worth 20%; research essay (1500 words), 30%; final exam, 30%

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”; Ezra Pound, “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”; 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”

American Literature of the 1950s

This course will introduce various ways of analyzing literary works of several kinds and offer practice in writing essays that articulate such analysis. By focusing on a particular place and period, America in the “long 1950s” (up to about 1963), for the term, we will develop familiarity with the historical and cultural contexts that inform the works we are reading. The goal of this approach is to enable us to learn more effectively about formal and theoretical approaches to literature, which can be employed in subsequent courses with other historical frames. Recurrent themes in the works we consider will include race relations and Civil Rights; the status of women; same-sex desire; relations between literature and music and the visual arts; changes in technology and material culture. We will read poetry by Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O’Hara, Robert Hayden, and others; fiction by James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, and others; and the drama of Tennessee Williams. Despite the stereotypes about “Fifties America,” this was a period of great cultural diversity, innovation, and accomplishment.

Assignments will include essays and a final exam, along with shorter exercises in observation and brainstorming.

Dear Reader

Many works of literature ask something of their readers; the texts we are studying this term all ask their readers to see differently. They alert us to things we have, perhaps, never seen, provoking recognition, understanding, and even empathy. In our reading and writing this term we will ask: how might literature affect readers? How do literary texts encourage readers to think and feel? How do they shift our perspective, decenter us, or move us into new relation with ourselves and others? Reading across genre (poetry, fiction, nonfiction) and time (1860-2018), we will focus our analysis on the following works: selected poems by Emily Dickinson; Harriet Jacobs’ slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession; and Terrance Hayes’ collection of sonnets, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.

We will deepen our understanding of these texts and their contexts with scholarly articles that explore the historical production and circulation of texts, literature’s role in the creation of empathy, and the affective dimensions of the reading experience. Over the term, students will be able to develop their own conclusions about literary address and the role readers play in the construction of literature, while developing their skills as academic writers.

Literature of the First World War: Comparative Approaches - Marlene Briggs

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 literature 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.

Indigenous Reading and Writing at the Edge of an Ocean

What happens when we think about Vancouver not as a city on the West Coast of a continent but as a city on the East Coast of an ocean? How can engaging with creative and critical writing by Indigenous people enable us to rethink, remap, and reimagine? What does it mean to be Indigenous – here, there, anywhere? How are Indigenous writers thinking about some of the most pressing issues of 2023: the climate crisis, social cohesion and justice, Indigenous rights, racism, colonialism/ capitalism, falling in love?

This course will focus on a wide range of short texts: poems, short fiction, short films, essays, blogposts. Students will also read texts of your choosing that connect our class discussions and readings with your own communities and networks. Evaluation will include short and long writing and research tasks, a reading log, a short presentation, and active participation.