Graduate Courses

Term 1
MON WED, 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Decadence and the Origins of Camp: A Queer Genealogy

“[Camp] is terribly hard to define but you’ll find yourself wanting to use the word whenever you discuss aesthetics or philosophy or almost anything.” – Christopher Isherwood

This seminar examines the origins (and trajectories) of the much-debated aesthetic sensibility known as camp. Widely understood as a celebration of artifice and stylized exaggeration, camp still struggles to be taken seriously because of its orientation toward humor and the un-serious. Although one of its earliest theorists, Susan Sontag, famously argued that camp was at its core “apolitical,” one of the questions students in this seminar will ponder is the potential political value (to queer and non-queer people alike) of camp style, performance, and gender critique. We will attempt to situate camp historically by locating its origins in the aesthetic strategies of 1890s Decadence before exploring its manifestations, transformations, and characteristic patterns across the twentieth century and beyond. In pursuit of this objective we will read literary and theoretical texts in addition to viewing several films. Our aim will not be to construct a camp canon, but instead to observe how camp and Decadence speak to queer experience at distinct historical moments while at the same time retaining recognizably transhistorical characteristics.

Readings will include (theory/criticism): Walter Pater, Susan Sontag, Fabio Cleto, Esther Newton, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, David Halperin, Paul Baker, and others; (literature) Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ronald Firbank, Noël Coward, Christopher Isherwood, Frank O’Hara, Joe Orton, and others. We will also view films by directors Robert Aldritch, John Waters, and Pedro Almodóvar.

Term 2
TUE THU, 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Storying Land: Canadian Literary Ecologies

Since emerging as a multidisciplinary field in the early twenty-first century, environmental humanities research has variously interrogated the narratives and cultural concepts figuring humanity’s relations to the land and non-human nature. Imperative to literary criticism within this paradigm has been not only a reappraisal of “nature” as an object of study but a reorientation of anthropocentric understandings of humanistic “culture” (including the Humanities) toward its material and ecological embeddedness—pressingly, the inseparability of environmental crises from their historical and cultural foundations shaping how we imagine (and might reimagine) what it means to live in relation to the land. In the context of lands claimed by the state formation of Canada—the land beneath our feet at UBC—such crises and relations are marked by the history of colonization and encompass radical differences between settler and Indigenous epistemologies. Literature in Canada is implicated in the historical stabilization of foundational binaries between “human” and “nature” that have naturalized the eliminatory and extractive logics of settler-colonial territoriality, a violent structure of both land-based domination and environmental injustice. A grounding place for struggles towards decolonial and/as environmental justice in the work of many writers, artists, scholars, thinkers, and activists in Canada today is thus the meaning of the land. How do we know the land in literature? Can literature write the land (without exploiting it)? How might the land itself speak through literature? How is it heard?

In this seminar we will take up these (and other) questions by examining literature’s relationship with land in the context of Canada. Our concern will be to first establish a historical perspective, and then to ask what role stories, literary arts, and humanities research are playing in denaturalizing settler-capitalism by envisioning reciprocal land relations and more environmentally just futures. We will examine the Eurodescendant epistemologies transposed by writers who mapped onto ostensibly “new” territory ideas about the sublime beauty or terror of a vast, unpopulated landscape—ideas like “wilderness” and “the North” that supported Canadian national identity, Indigenous erasure, and the work of “developing” lands and resources. We will consider how such land-claiming narratives delegitimated other ways of living and making meaning in relation to the land, displacing not only the storied knowledge of Indigenous peoples who have lived with the land for millennia, but other diasporic relations to place and ecology. We will look to decolonial epistemologies of land and kinship in contemporary Indigenous literary arts and activism to consider resurgence in relation to environmental justice (and in conflict with certain currents of “environmentalism”), and to cultural ecologies of non-Indigenous solidarity and anti-anthropocentric resistance. Our readings will broach both rural and urban lands in Canada, range from the Pacific coast to the Prairies to the high Arctic to the Maritimes, and address particular crises and sites of resource extraction (e.g., pipelines, tarsands, water, climate change), adopting an expansive sense of the “literary” in diverse genres and representational forms.

Readings

We’ll be localizing our approach to environmental humanism within Canadian contexts, drawing on Indigenous studies and settler-colonial studies as they interface with thinking in ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies, petrocultures/energy humanities, critical race studies, and environmental and climate justice.

Students can expect a mixture of creative and critical texts; while not a “theory” seminar exclusively, it encompasses theory and encourages students to consider stories and creative arts as theoretical. Generally, our seminars will combine secondary readings with a primary text(s) in the form of novels, books of poetry, short stories, short and feature-length films, digital media, and visual art. A provisional list of authors/artists includes Jeannette Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, Di Brandt, Edward Burtynsky, Warren Cariou, Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Glen Coulthard, Cherie Dimaline, Margery Fee, Northrop Frye, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, the Group of Seven, Donna Haraway, Tasha Hubbard, Naomi Klein, Bruno Latour, Lee Maracle, Cecily Nicholson, Rob Nixon, Howard O’Hagan, Al Purdy, Eden Robinson, Zoe Todd, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Imre Szeman, Tanya Tagaq, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Kyle Powys Whyte, Patrick Wolfe, rita wong, Kathryn Yusoff, Zacharias Kunuk.

Assignments

The course will likely involve 2 short reading response/reflection papers, one individual seminar presentation, one creative/critical project, and a final conference-style paper

Term 1
THU, 11:30 PM - 1:30 PM

This course will introduce new MA students to graduate-level research skills and professional practices. Meetings will include workshops, guest presentations, and library visits. Sessions will focus on topics such as research areas, thesis supervision, archival research, digital tools, applying for grants, and attending conferences. There are no formal assignments and the course is marked Pass/Fail

Term 2
THU, 11:30 PM - 1:30 PM

Seminar details will be posted  shortly.

Black Studies Now

Term 2
MON, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

What is Black studies? Although Black studies became institutionalized as an academic discipline in U.S. universities in the 1960s, it has existed since the 18th century as a set of intellectual traditions and liberation struggles. These traditions and struggles have borne witness to the production and maintenance of anti-Blackness, a mode of hierarchical distinction between humans. Black studies, therefore, is simultaneously a critique of Western modernity and as well as sizeable archive of social, political, and cultural alternatives.

This course surveys recent monographs in Black Studies to think about what is possible and to consider the work that still needs to be done in this field of inquiry. Students will be introduced to the history, theory and philosophy of Black studies, as well as the methodological formations and critical debates occurring within the field in the contemporary moment. Key principal concepts and methods in Black studies will be addressed over the course of the semester. While this is primarily a theory course, students can also expect to engage with myriad other forms of media, including film, poetry, music, and novels.

Term 2
TUE, 2:30PM - 5:30 PM

Studies in Poetry

In the last 75 years or so, much discourse in poetics has been concerned with the idea of the paraphrase—that is, with the prose version of the poem that is used to make the poem clearer. While paraphrases of this sort can be useful in teaching, there has been an unfortunate tendency among critics to discuss the paraphrase rather than the poem, to see a poem as merely a text like any other. The dominance of historicist approaches to literature in the last few decades has exacerbated this tendency. The result has been a tendency to discuss poetry as if it were not importantly different from prose. In this course, we’ll resist this tendency. After discussing a number of theoretical texts, we’ll consider lyric poems that insist on their status as poetry. We’ll look at a selection of poems from about 1600 to about 2020. These poems will fall into one of three groups: poems that deal with the relation between speech and writing, poems that focus on description, and poems that focus on form. Students will write a series of short analyses and one long essay.

Term 1
TUE, 12:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Beyond the Canon: Late-Medieval Popular Romance

Medieval popular romance is comprised of a fantastical body of texts that were popular in many senses of the word; widely read and copied, transmitted over many miles and languages across Europe, deeply influential in both literary and material medieval culture, and popular as the reading matter of the burgeoning urban mercantile classes of late-medieval England. Narratives of adventuring knights, scheming villains, ineffable faerie, and malevolent devils, these texts produce  an enchanted and wonder-filled world for their audiences. As a genre it contains narratives of the once-chivalric romances of the aristocratic classes, now repurposed as reading entertainments for the gentry and rising mercantile classes, simultaneously acting as aspirational literature and class critique.

This course is a graduate-level introduction to the scholarly field of medieval romance studies. It will introduce students to this lively and surprising genre, the range of historical and contemporary theoretical approaches to the material, and to the wider romance academic ecosystem.

Term 1
FRI, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

Crip of Color Critique: A Seminar on Disability, Race, and Empire

A seminar on the emerging field of crip-of-color critique, which brings together concepts and methodologies from critical disability studies, critical race theory, and post-colonial theory.

Term 2
TUE, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Contemporary Technology Rhetorics

This course aims for students to learn about rhetorical theory and criticism through the lens of technology studies. Readings will be drawn primarily from the field of rhetorical criticism, but will also delve into Science and Technology Studies [STS] and the philosophy of technology. Although we will examine a few older, landmark writings in the rhetoric of technology – the ways that people argue, debate, advocate and dissent against technologies, as well as how technologies are themselves persuasive – the course will focus on current trends and topics in the discipline, such as algorithmic rhetoric, procedural rhetoric, AI, memetic social media, weapons technologies, surveillance, drones, & etc. Course readings likely will include the recent “Rhetoric of/with AI” special issue of Rhetoric Society Quarterly (54.3), and writings by rhetoricians such as Sarah Hallenbeck, Zhaozhe Wang, Robin Jensen, Ian Bogost, Heather Ashley Hayes, and Chris Ingraham. STS scholarship might include writings by Natasha Dow Schüll, Bruno Latour, and Deborah Cowen, while from the philosophy of technology and media, authors might include Byung-Chul Han and Armond Towns.

Term 1
FRI, 10:00 AM - 12:30 AM

Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Senses

The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.

--Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

The senses are not immutable; they have social, political, and cultural histories. In the nineteenth-century, new understandings of the senses emerged. The senses were hierarchized and employed in arguments about gender, race, class, and empire. Developments in science and physiological psychology gave rise to laboratory studies of the senses. New technologies permitted the “extension” of the senses in telephones, x-rays machines, and powerful telescopes and microscopes. Sensorial disabilities were reconceived. Literary texts shared the culture’s fascination with the senses: “Sensation” fiction sought to produce sense experiences in readers; realism relied on vivid sensory description; early science fiction imagined alternative perceptual organizations.

This seminar asks how the senses were categorized, conceptualized, and represented in nineteenth-century literature. Topics discussed will include depictions of deafness and blindness in fiction; imperialism and the senses; odor, race, and class; gender and dominant senses; the aesthetic movement and sensory experience; the sensory onslaught of the industrial city; the extrasensory world of the Victorian séance, and new sensory technologies.

Texts will include:

• Wilkie Collins, Poor Miss Finch
• Charles Dickens, “Dr. Marigold”; and from American Notes
• Rudyard Kipling, “They”
• Sheridan Le Fanu, “Green Tea”
• Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
• Florence McLandburgh, “The Automaton Ear”
• Edith Nesbit, “The Five Senses”
• Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
• Rabindranath Tagore, “Vision”
• H.G. Wells, “The Country of the Blind”; “Davidson’s Eyes”; “Intelligence on Mars”

from

Constance Classen, “Synaesthesia Unraveled: The Union of the Senses from a Cultural Perspective”

Jennifer Esmail, Reading Victorian Deafness

Hsuan L. Hsu, The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

Andrew Rotter, “Empires of the Senses: How Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Shaped Imperial Encounters”

M. Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses

Term 2
MON, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

Modernist Fiction, Imperial Decline, and Decolonization

The literary historical period we call “modernism” (c. 1880-1945) sees the height of the British empire in its territorial span while also bearing witness to its decline in the face of anti-colonial and national independence movements. How was empire and its loss represented by modernist authors? How did their aesthetic strategies mediate racial and colonial difference? And how did authors from the colonies simultaneously take up and challenge modernist forms in their efforts at anti-colonial resistance and decolonization? What kinds of modernist literary and sociological institutions facilitated the emergence of postcolonial authors in the postwar period? This course will introduce students to key modernist novels; trace the evolution of modernism through its subperiods of high modernism, late modernism, and postcolonial modernity; and think through the political affordances of modernist aesthetic practices. We will focus primarily on the history of Britain and its colonies, though we may also turn to the Harlem Renaissance to consider modernism in a transatlantic frame. Given the focus on fiction, the course will be reading-intensive and students should be prepared to cover a novel (some longer, some shorter) each week. Texts we are likely to study include: E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India; James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September; George Orwell’s Burmese Days; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World; Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable; Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea; Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners; George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin; and Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing.

Term 2
FRI, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

Folk Horror

In the early nineteenth-century, intellectuals in the United States, Britain, and Europe became fascinated with the culture of what was called the “folk.” Indicating population pockets that allegedly had not yet entered modernity (and in some cases, it was believed, never would enter modernity), the “folk” were a vital source of myth and fictional narrative for Western romanticism, providing modern nations and peoples with deep time histories and legendary authorizations for current power. In this course we will read and watch works from within a subset of folk narrative called folk horror. Unlike conventional gothic horror stories, which often focus on the malevolence of bygone aristocratic, monarchical, and religious formations, folk horror posits the haunting of modernity by a primitive past, whether an unfamiliar group of people/creatures or set of ancient stories that modernity has forgotten or failed to overcome.  Folk horror has also, importantly, been utilized to relay the experiences and histories of marginalized groups. In this course, we will study several folk horror tales and films with a view to understanding their relationship to the development of modern nationalisms and to racialized and evolutionary historiography. In addition to studying works of fiction, we will also read theoretical works linked to the gothic and to critical race, decolonial, and feminist theory. We will read Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, and Cherie Dimaline. We will also watch the following films: The Wicker Man, The Witch, Us, and Midsomer. We will read Sigmund Freud, Julia Kristeva, Étienne Balibar, Slavoj Žižek, Susan Stewart, Tzvetan Todorov, Hortense Spillers, Alexander G. Weheliye, and Christina Sharpe.

Term 2
WED, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

"In Search of Our Better Selves:" Settler Colonialism and Narratives of Settler Replacement

Course Description
This graduate-level course will engage with critical questions surrounding the dynamics of settler colonialism, particularly the ways in which settler narratives of replacement and erasure intersect with Indigenous identities, histories, and struggles for self-determination. We will explore the frameworks of settler colonialism in the current contexts of Canada and the U.S., examining how these political systems have consistently sought to dispossess Indigenous peoples, not only geographically but also culturally and temporally. Through the lens of Indigenous cultural and political knowledge production, we will investigate how settler colonialism’s narratives of replacement shape the understandings of belonging, time, and community in settler states, and how these processes have been resisted, disrupted, and reimagined by Indigenous peoples and communities.

Term 1
WED, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Seminar details will be posted shortly.

Term 1
WED, 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

Seminar details will be posted shortly.

Term 2
TUE, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Postcolonial Auto/Mobility

This seminar explores the interplay between postcolonial automobility and African literatures and cultures. We will take as our starting point of investigation the emergence of the motor vehicle in Africa, around the beginning of the twentieth century, and the cogent questions that arise from (post)colonial Africa’s encounter with vehicular technology. Through novels, plays, poetry, and films, we will consider Africa’s automobile network of road, spatiality, coloniality, infrastructure, motor vehicle, and oil and the corollary effects of all this on the artistic imaginations of African cultural producers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In short, this course considers the keyword “automobility” as an entry point to unpacking the range of ideas that have shaped African literary production since the twentieth century. Primary readings will include works from authors and artists such as Peter Abrahams, Wole Soyinka, Nawal El-Saadawi, Ousmane Sembene, Ama Ata Aidoo, Karen King-Aribisala, Ben Okri, and Imbolo Mbue. We will ground our examinations in criticism from scholars such as Marti Kheel, Harry Garuba, AbdouMaliq Simone, Kenda Mutongi, Cajetan Iheka, and others.

Term 1
TUE, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Seminar details will be posted shortly.

Term 2
WED, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

This seminar explores the variety of meanings associated with the terms performative and performativity. These terms and concepts initially belong to two very different discourses, speech act theory and theater studies, but have found their way into general use in the theoretical humanities. Our concerns are, in part, genealogical: we will track the emergence of these concepts in ordinary language philosophy (J.L. Austin. How to Do Things with Words), their uptakes in Continental philosophy, and their inflections and uses in feminist and queer theory. We will also be concerned with auxiliary terms and concepts that have followed from the performative (such as the distinction between illocutionary, locutionary, and perlocutionary aspects of speech acts and the idea of the para-performative). The course goal is to unpack the meanings these terms have come to have in the last two or three decades, their particular coherence and incoherence, their uses and intended consequences (for example, in the contrast between performativity and representation), and the values associated with these terms. Alongside explicitly theoretical readings we will encounter a handful of twentieth-century plays or scripts that themselves offer accounts of performativity in either a linguistic or theatrical sense, and the possible relations between these senses.

Readings to include work by J.L. Austin, Samuel Beckett, Judith Butler, Stanley Cavell, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Nathalie Sarraute, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gertrude Stein, and others.

Term 2
FRI, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Modernism and the Psychoanalysis of Fascism, 1894-1945

            The people who have shown the best understanding of Fascism are either those who have
suffered under it or those who have a Fascist streak in themselves. --- George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler and the World State" (1941)

            It seems to me a monstrosity; by that I mean something that is altogether beyond the
bounds of common sense, truth and justice, a blind and stupid thing that would drag us
back centuries in time, ultimately a thing that would lead to religious persecution, which
            is the worst of abominations and would bathe every country in blood. --- Émile Zola, "A Plea for the Jews" (1896)

            There were other swastikas. They were the chalk ones now; I followed them down
Bergasse as if they had been chalked on the pavement especially for my benefit. They led
to the Professor's door--- H. D., Tribute to Freud [1933]

This seminar explores the critical and analytical writings of those whose experience of European fascism was visceral and immediate. We will proceed for the most part chronologically to perceive the unfolding of history as these key witnesses experienced it. We will assess this living history of the period both for its penetrating insights into the reality of things and for its dialectically potent forms of misrecognition. Invariably "alive to reverberations of the future" (André Breton qtd. by Walter Benjamin in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"), these authors could not always know how the story would end.

Activities and assignments will include a seminar presentation and a close reading of a selected passage. Students will also write one three-page essay, to be distributed and read aloud, and one final research paper.

We will seek the definition of the key words of the seminar--modernism, psychoanalysis, fascism--as it flows up from our reading. Since we can read only a practical selection of the following reading list in our allotted twelve weeks (the final reading schedule will be available this summer), students will be invited in their independent research projects to explore some of the readings not covered in our weekly meetings.

Reading List (in progress):

• Émile Zola, "A Plea for the Jews" (1896)
• Émile Zola, "J'accuse!" (1898)
• F.T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909)
• F.T. Marinetti, "Let's Murder the Moonshine" (1909)
• Franz Kafka, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia" (1909)
• W.E. B. Du Bois, "World War and the Color Line" (1914)
• Richard Harding Davis, With the Allies (1914)
• Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915)
• Edith Wharton, Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (1915)
• Ellen La Motte, The Backwash of War (1916)
• Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (1929) [1914-18]
• Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925) [1914-15]
• Henri Barbusse, Under Fire (1916)
• Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918)
• Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (1920)
• Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921)
• Ernest Hemingway, "Mussolini: Biggest Bluff in Europe" (1923)
• Ernest Hemingway, "Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
• Henri Barbusse, Thus and Thus (1927)
• Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
• Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews (1926-7)
• Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) [1929]
• Walter Benjamin, "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intellectual" (1929)
• Walter Benjamin, "Theories of German Fascism" (1930)
• William Faulkner, "Dry September" (1932)
• H.D. [Hilda Doolittle], Tribute to Freud (1956) [1933-44]
• Victor Klemperer, Victor, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 (Volume 1, 1998)
• Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935)
• William Faulkner, Pylon (1935)
• Ernest Hemingway, "Notes on the Next War: A Serious Topical Letter" (1935)
• Ernest Hemingway, "Wings Always Over Africa: An Ornithological Letter" (1936)
• Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Diary of a Man in Despair (1947) [1930s and 40s]
• Kenneth Burke, "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle'" (1939)
• George Orwell, "Wells, Hitler and the World State" (1941)
• Richard Hillary, The Last Enemy (1942)
• George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language" (1946)
• Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951) [1944]
• Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism" (1975)
• Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992)
• Timothy Snyder, "Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?" (2011)
• Christopher R. Browning, "Hitler's Enablers." New York Review of Books LXXI, November 7, 2024, pp. 52-54.

Suggested General and Preliminary Reading:

•  Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
• Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (1995)
• Barbara Will, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011)
• Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books, 2010).
• Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (2015)
• Maurice Samuels, Alfred Dreyfus: The Man at the Centre of the Affair (2024)