Courses

Section Description

Im/Migration

Our shared approach to the course will centre on Im/Migration. Together we will examine texts and narratives about travel, mobility, migrations, journeys, departures and arrivals of various kinds--voluntary, forced, opportunistic, and fantastic. We will ask how literature can help us think about such questions as these: What types of social and political factors lead or force people to leave their place of origin? What does it mean to have a place of origin, and who has been entitled to claim one? How are borders established and what do they do? How does dislocation create new forms of being and belonging?

Section Description

Im/Migration

Our shared approach to the course will centre on Im/Migration. Together we will examine texts and narratives about travel, mobility, migrations, journeys, departures and arrivals of various kinds--voluntary, forced, opportunistic, and fantastic. We will ask how literature can help us think about such questions as these: What types of social and political factors lead or force people to leave their place of origin? What does it mean to have a place of origin, and who has been entitled to claim one? How are borders established and what do they do? How does dislocation create new forms of being and belonging?

Section Description

Im/Migration

Our shared approach to the course will centre on Im/Migration. Together we will examine texts and narratives about travel, mobility, migrations, journeys, departures and arrivals of various kinds--voluntary, forced, opportunistic, and fantastic. We will ask how literature can help us think about such questions as these: What types of social and political factors lead or force people to leave their place of origin? What does it mean to have a place of origin, and who has been entitled to claim one? How are borders established and what do they do? How does dislocation create new forms of being and belonging?

Section Description

Im/Migration

Our shared approach to the course will centre on Im/Migration. Together we will examine texts and narratives about travel, mobility, migrations, journeys, departures and arrivals of various kinds--voluntary, forced, opportunistic, and fantastic. We will ask how literature can help us think about such questions as these: What types of social and political factors lead or force people to leave their place of origin? What does it mean to have a place of origin, and who has been entitled to claim one? How are borders established and what do they do? How does dislocation create new forms of being and belonging?

Section Description

Hauntings and Spectral Possibilities in English Literary Studies

“It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre). These sections of the collaboratively taught ENGL 200 (005, 006, and 007) will focus on haunting: the in/visible elements that bump, rattle, and wail in the night. We will examine a variety of literary texts, probing how ghosts and things that haunt productively unsettle the supposed status quo. Our conversations will include hauntings that challenge sanitized colonial narratives, the liminality of ghostly presences/absences, the ghosts of our futures, and the material repercussions of social and familial hauntings. Storytelling will also figure strongly in the course as we invite students to consider how they can leverage haunting as a critical framework for reconsidering the social, cultural, and national spaces they inhabit.

Section Description

Hauntings and Spectral Possibilities in English Literary Studies

“It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre). These sections of the collaboratively taught ENGL 200 (005, 006, and 007) will focus on haunting: the in/visible elements that bump, rattle, and wail in the night. We will examine a variety of literary texts, probing how ghosts and things that haunt productively unsettle the supposed status quo. Our conversations will include hauntings that challenge sanitized colonial narratives, the liminality of ghostly presences/absences, the ghosts of our futures, and the material repercussions of social and familial hauntings. Storytelling will also figure strongly in the course as we invite students to consider how they can leverage haunting as a critical framework for reconsidering the social, cultural, and national spaces they inhabit.

Section Description

Hauntings and Spectral Possibilities in English Literary Studies

“It seemed, sir, a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. I know not what dress she had on: it was white and straight; but whether gown, sheet, or shroud, I cannot tell” (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre). These sections of the collaboratively taught ENGL 200 (005, 006, and 007) will focus on haunting: the in/visible elements that bump, rattle, and wail in the night. We will examine a variety of literary texts, probing how ghosts and things that haunt productively unsettle the supposed status quo. Our conversations will include hauntings that challenge sanitized colonial narratives, the liminality of ghostly presences/absences, the ghosts of our futures, and the material repercussions of social and familial hauntings. Storytelling will also figure strongly in the course as we invite students to consider how they can leverage haunting as a critical framework for reconsidering the social, cultural, and national spaces they inhabit.

Section Description

Creation, Destruction, Reflection, Rebuilding

This team-taught course examines how literature intersects with pivotal moments in the lives of individuals, collectives, and our planet. We will explore a range of literary texts across time that engage with ideas of making and unmaking. Our explorations might include an ancient poem about how the world was created, or texts that reflect on the destructive wars of the twentieth century. Sometimes we will encounter art forms that build themselves on the bones of other forms, that take old traditions apart in order to create new ones for their own time and place. Some of our texts might be celebratory, some apocalyptic; all of them show the power of literature to reflect the human experience in profound and unforgettable ways.

This course meets three times a week: Mondays and Fridays are for each section to meet with its designated instructor, while Wednesdays bring together several sections for one large lecture. These large lectures rotate through the course’s four instructors. The idea is to introduce you to some of the vast range of texts and approaches that constitute literary studies today, as well as to give you a taste of how different professors approach teaching and thinking about literary texts.

Through our class meetings, the large lectures, and a range of assignments, you will develop tools to approach diverse texts in ways that attend to their formal structure, content, and socio-historical contexts. You will hone your skills in close reading/ analysis in ways that support broader arguments about literature and culture. You will develop self-reflexive and critical awareness of your own reading methods, preferences, and biases, and you will understand the institutional contexts of literary studies.

List of texts and readings for this section of ENGL 200 will be posted here once determined.

Section Description

Creation, Destruction, Reflection, Rebuilding

This team-taught course examines how literature intersects with pivotal moments in the lives of individuals, collectives, and our planet. We will explore a range of literary texts across time that engage with ideas of making and unmaking. Our explorations might include an ancient poem about how the world was created, or texts that reflect on the destructive wars of the twentieth century. Sometimes we will encounter art forms that build themselves on the bones of other forms, that take old traditions apart in order to create new ones for their own time and place. Some of our texts might be celebratory, some apocalyptic; all of them show the power of literature to reflect the human experience in profound and unforgettable ways.

This course meets three times a week: Mondays and Fridays are for each section to meet with its designated instructor, while Wednesdays bring together several sections for one large lecture. These large lectures rotate through the course’s four instructors. The idea is to introduce you to some of the vast range of texts and approaches that constitute literary studies today, as well as to give you a taste of how different professors approach teaching and thinking about literary texts.

Through our class meetings, the large lectures, and a range of assignments, you will develop tools to approach diverse texts in ways that attend to their formal structure, content, and socio-historical contexts. You will hone your skills in close reading/ analysis in ways that support broader arguments about literature and culture. You will develop self-reflexive and critical awareness of your own reading methods, preferences, and biases, and you will understand the institutional contexts of literary studies.

List of texts and readings for this section of ENGL 200 will be posted here once determined.

Section Description

Creation, Destruction, Reflection, Rebuilding

This team-taught course examines how literature intersects with pivotal moments in the lives of individuals, collectives, and our planet. We will explore a range of literary texts across time that engage with ideas of making and unmaking. Our explorations might include an ancient poem about how the world was created, or texts that reflect on the destructive wars of the twentieth century. Sometimes we will encounter art forms that build themselves on the bones of other forms, that take old traditions apart in order to create new ones for their own time and place. Some of our texts might be celebratory, some apocalyptic; all of them show the power of literature to reflect the human experience in profound and unforgettable ways.

This course meets three times a week: Mondays and Fridays are for each section to meet with its designated instructor, while Wednesdays bring together several sections for one large lecture. These large lectures rotate through the course’s four instructors. The idea is to introduce you to some of the vast range of texts and approaches that constitute literary studies today, as well as to give you a taste of how different professors approach teaching and thinking about literary texts.

Through our class meetings, the large lectures, and a range of assignments, you will develop tools to approach diverse texts in ways that attend to their formal structure, content, and socio-historical contexts. You will hone your skills in close reading/ analysis in ways that support broader arguments about literature and culture. You will develop self-reflexive and critical awareness of your own reading methods, preferences, and biases, and you will understand the institutional contexts of literary studies.

List of texts and readings for this section of ENGL 200 will be posted here once determined.

Section Description

Creation, Destruction, Reflection, Rebuilding

This team-taught course examines how literature intersects with pivotal moments in the lives of individuals, collectives, and our planet. We will explore a range of literary texts across time that engage with ideas of making and unmaking. Our explorations might include an ancient poem about how the world was created, or texts that reflect on the destructive wars of the twentieth century. Sometimes we will encounter art forms that build themselves on the bones of other forms, that take old traditions apart in order to create new ones for their own time and place. Some of our texts might be celebratory, some apocalyptic; all of them show the power of literature to reflect the human experience in profound and unforgettable ways.

This course meets three times a week: Mondays and Fridays are for each section to meet with its designated instructor, while Wednesdays bring together several sections for one large lecture. These large lectures rotate through the course’s four instructors. The idea is to introduce you to some of the vast range of texts and approaches that constitute literary studies today, as well as to give you a taste of how different professors approach teaching and thinking about literary texts.

Through our class meetings, the large lectures, and a range of assignments, you will develop tools to approach diverse texts in ways that attend to their formal structure, content, and socio-historical contexts. You will hone your skills in close reading/ analysis in ways that support broader arguments about literature and culture. You will develop self-reflexive and critical awareness of your own reading methods, preferences, and biases, and you will understand the institutional contexts of literary studies.

List of texts and readings for this section of ENGL 200 will be posted here once determined.

Section Description

The Literary Imagination: Traditions and Counter-Traditions

A year-long (6 credit) course, English 210 is designed to provide Honours students with a firm grounding in English-language literary studies. Its organization is largely chronological, beginning in the medieval period and continuing to the present day. It aims to introduce students to a wide sampling of literary works of poetry, fiction, and drama across the centuries, and to equip them with the analytical tools employed in the scholarly study of these genres.

Although these texts – and their authors – engage a diverse variety of topics, in reading and writing about 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 our readings in their historical and cultural contexts, we should also, where appropriate, allow ourselves to approach them with a sense of openness and humour.

Section Description

Introduction to Canadian Literature (Land, Labour, and Literatures)

Taking the period from early imperial contact and exploration, to Confederation, the turn of the century when Canada’s presence on the global stage began to be felt, through to the Great Wars, Modernism, Postmodernism and the present day, ENGL 222 examines selected features of Canada’s complex and diverse literary history in English. Our survey will interrogate the vibrancy of literary genre across time, comprising Canadian poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction. In doing so, this course will consider the literary, geographic, political, historical, racial, economic and social processes that have facilitated the contexts and content of authorship and text in Canada. What do these literary forms tell us about “Canada,” and what is set into motion by the interaction of this modifier with “literature”? What does Canadian literature tell “us” about the form of the nation and its citizens in the present day? What does a study of literature have to do with answering questions about nationhood, identity, community, and citizenship? Why does it matter? In attempting to answer these (and other) questions, we will remain committed to the complexities of audience and reception, genre, authorship, and the future of Canada. We will consider not only what it means to tell a story about Canada, who tells it, and how the story is told, laterally connected, and distinct, but who is meant to hear the story, and when.

Section Description

What if… ? Speculative Literatures in Canada (where ‘Eh’ is for Apocalypse)

  “The apocalyptic images are not just alarmist rhetoric: by pretty clear scientific consensus, there is ample reason to be afraid...”—Catriona Sandilands, Storying Climate Change

  “We can’t possibly live otherwise until we first imagine otherwise”—Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

What if global warming causes a pandemic of dreamlessness and a future where Indigenous peoples are hunted for a cure reportedly found in their bone marrow? What if scientists genetically re-engineered humanity to better survive climate apocalypse? What if geronticide emerged as a popular solution to intergenerational conflicts over economic inequality? What if cyborgs wrote poetry? What if a child’s emotional distress resulted in transmogrification into a giant red panda? What if... what if... what if…

Speculative literature—an umbrella category or “supergenre” associated with genres like science fiction, dystopia, fantasy, and horror—is storytelling of the what if. It alters or extends (often into uncomfortable places) the conditions of the world as we know it in order to consider what might be, and in doing so invariably returns us to what has been and is, to the present that prompts such creative acts of speculation. Focusing its exploration of Canadian literatures through the genres of speculative fiction, this course will examine some of the big “what ifs” being asked by Canadian and Indigenous storytellers today. We’ll read stories about climate apocalypse and the end of the world, about the horrors of colonial history and dystopian neocolonial futures, and about monstrous bodies and posthuman figures, and we’ll consider how such fantastic fictions function to comment on our realities. Indeed, while apocalypse and dystopia have long been spaces for writers to play out the potentially perilous futures of society’s present conditions—a tradition contemporary “cli-fi” continues in response to the very real horror of climate catastrophe—for many marginalized by those conditions, apocalypse and dystopia are not simply imaginative spaces. By exploring a diverse selection of texts and authors, we will thus attend to some of the different ways writers and artists in Canada are employing the fantastic to develop a cultural politics from speculative interventions into both troubling pasts and challenges of the present. We will consider questions such as: what are the powers, possibilities, and limits of speculative genres? How does genre function differently for different writers/audiences in different contexts? What are the hopes, fears, and political imaginaries of the worlds Canadian speculative storytelling brings into being? And how does the “what if?” help us to “imagine otherwise”?

The readings and viewings will comprise novels, films, short stories, and poems in several (sometimes overlapping) SF genres—climate fiction (“cli-fi”), (post-)apocalyptic, dystopia/utopia, horror, alternate history, sci-fi, Afro- and Indigenous futurism, and urban fantasy. Primary texts will likely be selected from works by Margaret Atwood, Lindsay B-e, Jeff Barnaby, Wayde Compton, Cherie Dimaline, Hiromi Goto, Lisa Jackson, Doretta Lau, and Domee Shi.

Section Description

This course offers a focused introduction to Literature in the United States. We will read a selection of stories, novels, plays, poems, personal narratives, and "special cases": "It has rightly been said that all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve  one--that they are, in other words, special cases" (Walter Benjamin, "On the Image of Proust," 1927). Our themes will include the legacy of Puritanism and the American revolution; the history of slavery and "race;" the social divisions of gender, class, and labor; the romance of the American dream and its "obverse reflections" (Faulkner) in some versions of American gothic; narrative experiments and modernist form; the pastoral domain and the waste land; and others.

Readings may include the following:

Short Stories

• J.D. Salinger, "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (1948)
• Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853)
• William Faulkner, "Dry September" (1931)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" (1836)
• Edgar Allan Poe, "The Oval Portrait" (1842)
• Kate Chopin, "Desirée's Baby" (1893)

Special Cases

• Joan Didion, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" (1966)
• Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925)
• Ta-Nehesi Coates, Between the World and Me (2015)
• Thomas Jefferson et al., "The Declaration of Independence" (1776)

Novel

• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

Poetry

• T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Drama

• Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959)

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.

Section Description

An Introduction to African Writing

“One must look at the world from Africa to be an African writer,
not look upon Africa from the world” (Nadine Gordimer)

Africa is a fascinatingly diverse and complex continent, and its writing–although a relatively recent development–reflects this diversity. This section of English 224 will provide an introduction to African literature through the study of a range of novels and short stories. These works reflect a range of styles and thematic concerns, and are drawn from west, south, east and north Africa.

Course texts: Course texts will include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Miriama Ba, So Long a Letter, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Twenty Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing (a short story anthology).

Section Description

This course, designed specifically for students in the Bachelor of Media Studies program, provides foundational understanding of four major approaches to media studies (historical; theoretical; environmental; social justice). The outcomes of the course will enable students to negotiate media in terms of their theoretical foundations and distinguish critically the different effects produced by different media, with broad application in and beyond the study of media.

Section Description

Something in the Shadows is Watching

“You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are.” -- Angela Carter, “The Company of Wolves”

From The Turn of the Screw to The Others, creepy children frequently haunt Gothic texts. But what of Gothic texts assuming a young audience? Children’s/YA literature so often focuses on successful (or not so successful) negotiation of threats and learning opportunities in the intimate and public worlds around the child that “children’s” tales are often scarier than adult fiction. In this section, we will study a variety of texts through a literary/cultural studies lens, exploring their (sometimes) evolving genre features. We’ll start with familiar (and not-so-familiar) oral-tradition folk and fairy tales, to consider how their recurring devices establish tropes still frequently recurring. Then we will stray from the path and consider how a selection of novels might challenge or subvert perceived boundaries and conventions, especially in engaging with Gothic themes and motifs, ending with a graphic novel examining adolescent engagement with 1990s Goth culture.

We will also discover approaches to children’s/YA texts in literary/cultural studies at the university level.

Texts:

Core texts tentatively include a selection of traditional folk and fairy tales; Alan Garner, The Owl Service; Francesca Lia Block, The Rose and The Beast; Neil Gaiman, Coraline; and Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki, Skim.

Evaluation:

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

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

Section Description

Regulating and Claiming Desire: (Re)Constructions of Gender and Sexuality in Children’s and YA Literature

“All children, except one, grow up” (Barrie, Peter Pan)

This course will introduce key shifts and tensions within children’s and young adult literature centring on representations and explorations of (primarily female) gender and emerging (often channelled) sexuality. We will begin by examining classic fairy tales, bringing them into conversation with modern Disney revisioning of them, before shifting to Victorian perceptions of childhood and the passage to adulthood. From there, we will examine evolving portrayals of puberty and sexual desire in the 1970s (e.g., Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret) before moving on to more contemporary texts that offer both conservative (e.g., Twilight) as well as expansive and intersectional notions of adolescent gender, sexuality, and embodiment. The relationality facilitated by new technologies and shifting media landscapes will be treated at the end of the course. Questions of genre (e.g., fantasy, parable, realism, dystopian, romance) will also be considered in relation to youthful desire and its production/consumption/regulation.

Section Description

On Television

This course takes up television (specifically, North American television) as an object of investigation and a subject for criticism. We will approach television by watching it as well as by reading literary, historical, and critical writing about it. Treatments of television are often characterized by sexual fantasy, political anxiety, intense excitement and contempt, and highly reflexive irony. We will try to understand why television is so provocative, why it has been so difficult to understand, and how we may develop tools and techniques to approach it critically. Warning: some of the materials for reading and viewing in this course feature strong language, sexuality, and violence. Viewer discretion is advised.

The learning objectives of this course include:

• familiarize students with the history of network television in the United States
• introduce students to formal vocabulary to describe televisual experience
• communicate to students tools for critical thinking and writing about television

The course format will combine lectures, discussion, and group work.

Section Description

Genres of Detection

This course surveys the major developments in detective fiction from the mid-nineteenth-century to the present. It covers the major genres of detection including the classic mystery, “hard-boiled,” “noir,” and police procedural and features most of the major authors of the field such as Poe, Christie, Doyle, Hammett, Chandler, Hughes, Grafton, Peretsky, Simenon, Rankin, and Robinson. The course will focus mainly on short stories so that we can consider as wide a range of styles and approaches to detection as possible. But we will also read some longer and recently published novels in order to see how detective fiction engages in depth the challenging issues of its time, including gender violence and persistent colonialism.

Evaluation:

• In-class participation (10%)
• Weekly online discussion posts (20%)
• Writing Assignment (30%)
• Mid-term and final exams (40%)

Texts (subject to change):

• Mansfield-Kelley and Marchino (eds), The Longman Anthology of Detective Fiction (2005)
• Hughes, In a Lonely Place (1947) + film, dir. Nicholas Ray (1950)
• King, Dreadfulwater (2002)
• Braithwaite, My Sister the Serial Killer (2019)

Section Description

Note: Blended Course

Technical Writing examines the rhetorical genre of professional and technical communication, especially online, through analysis and application of its principles and practices. You will produce a formal report, investigating resources and/or concerns in a real-life community, as a major project involving a series of linked assignments. This project will involve the study (and possibly practical application) of research ethics where human subjects are involved (e.g. in conducting surveys or interviews). Evaluation will be based on a series of four linked assignments culminating in the formal report, as well as participation in discussion and completion of various textbook exercises.

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. Technical Writing is closed to first- and second-year students in Arts and cannot be used for credit towards the English Major or Minor.

Text: The course text will be Lannon et al, Technical Communications, 8th Canadian Edition, Pearson, 2020.

Please note that this is a blended course and will require both participation in synchronous lectures and workshops as well as asynchronous but scheduled independent work of the sort done in a conventional online course (e.g. weekly Canvas-based textbook exercises and occasional peer feedback on drafts).

Also note that while 301 is not a course in remedial grammar, this section will provide online Canvas-based writing resources and workshops designed to help identify writing and proofreading problems, and to provide strategies to address them.

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

Section Description

To study the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine is to study both the rhetorical effects of these domains on the world and the rhetorical processes by which these domains are rendered distinguishable, authoritative, and even essential to our survival. In this class, we will situate our study in the context of gender and specifically transgender experience. Regardless of our own gender identities and expressions, we all exist in relation to discourses, industries, and policies that are deeply gendered. From surgical medicine to airport security to the video game industry, our lives are tightly regulated by unspoken assumptions about gender: who can choose it, who can change it, and why it matters. These issues are particularly important to trans and gender nonconforming people who often face obstacles accessing the care and services they need to survive. Even as many scientists, tech developers, and medical practitioners work to be more gender-inclusive, it is becoming apparent that their inclusivity is often limited to people who are white, financially secure, and nondisabled. As we will discover this term, studying the (trans)gendered rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine is not only to make a value judgement on a person's or institution's progressivism but also to evaluate these rhetorics' material effects on trans people’s lives, especially on those who exist at the margins of trans community.

The semester will be divided into two sections. The first half will be methodological and historical, introducing a range of rhetorical approaches to science, technology, and medicine, as well as exposing the (trans)gendered history of each of these domains’ development. We will focus especially on the insights and perspectives of trans, gender nonconforming, and otherwise gender minoritized people. While not all of these scholars are rhetoricians by training, each of them offers important insights on how techno-science and medicine have been rhetorically designed to regulate gender norms. The second half of the course will center trans and gender nonconforming people’s counter-rhetorics that trouble the authority of the medical industrial complex and the profit-driven motivations of the tech industry. These counter-rhetorics reimagine trans life in ways that are both gender-affirming and community-oriented. Throughout the second half of the course, students will collaborate on a service-learning project that addresses some of the health needs of the trans community at UBC.