2024 Winter

Learn more about the Ways of Knowingdegree requirement for students entering the BA degree program in 2024/25 or later. The Department of English Language and Literatures offers ENGL 228 as a course that will meet the Place and Power breadth requirement.

What are the new Bachelor of Arts Degree Requirements?
Course Planning? See the Arts Ways of Knowing Breadth Requirement Explorer

A. Medieval and Renaissance literatures: ENGL 343 to ENGL 350

B. 18th- and 19th-century literatures: ENGL 351 to ENGL 364

C. Modern, contemporary, transnational, and Indigenous literatures: ENGL 365 to ENGL 379

D. Media, theory, genre, and special topic:  ENGL 332 to ENGL 339; ENGL 380 to ENGL 397

A. Structure of English: ENGL 330, 331, 321

B. History of English: ENGL 318, 319, 342, 343, 344, 346

C. Approaches to contemporary English: ENGL 323, 324, 328

D. Discourse and meaning: ENGL 312, 322, 327

E. Rhetoric: ENGL 307-311

Note: topics covered in any of the above groups may also focus on ENGL 326 (which has no permanent title) and ENGL 489 (majors seminar-language, where the instructor decides on the topic offered in any given year).

Each course will be classed into one of the groups A-E in any given year, depending on the topic covered. Please see an advisor if you want ENGL 326 or ENGL 489 to count as satisfying group A-E requirements.

Term 1
MWF, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

The Madwoman in the Attic: Literary Explorations of Madness

How do we define madness, and how can it be conveyed in literary texts? Who decides when someone is mad, and how is it linked to gender, class and ethnicity? When and how has madness been historically weaponized, especially against women?

In this course, we will study a range of novels and poetry from the nineteenth through to the twenty-first century, developing skills of close critical analysis as well as exploring the historical and cultural contexts in which these works were produced. We will also consider a range of theoretical and critical approaches to interpreting these texts.

The course will begin with Edgar Allen Poe’s classic short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (our token male writer!) and then shift to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, skip forward to the mid-twentieth century to discuss Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, as well as a selection of her poetry, take another jump forward to Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel, Alias Grace, and wind up in the twenty-first century with Freshwater, a ground-breaking novel by Akwaeke Emezi, an American writer of Nigerian/Tamil descent.

Term 1
MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1
MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Dancing in Chains: Writing and Reading Translation

If creation is a dance, translation is a dance in chains. –Bijan Elahi (trans. from Persian by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian)

Obviously, all translators need not be nonbinary…--Suneela Mubayi

What is the mysterious work of literary translation, and how does this unsung practice shape how we read and hear texts ancient and modern? How should we read translated texts? Who are translators—and should a translator’s gender, race, or politics affect our readings? Is translation queer, trans, nonbinary? Can the act of translation be imperialist or otherwise unethical? Could you, yourself, translate literature into or out of English, or from one medium to another? This first-year writing course prepares students for the English and other humanities majors through intensive reading and writing, lots of conversation, and (optional) creative work with language and media.

Term 1
MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Genres of Indigeneity 

This course is a writing-intensive introduction to the discipline of Indigenous literary studies, specifically through an engagement with a text's (a book, a poem, a play, et cetera) critical and theoretical contexts. This course is recommended for students considering English as a major in particular. The focus of this course will be contemporary Indigenous literatures from the context of what is currently called Canada, with a emphasis placed on the notion of "genre" and its possibilities, limits, and/or constraints. What does the form of the novel enable? What can it prohibit, delimit, or foreclose? What political work is a poem doing (if any), especially in and for Indigenous communities? This course takes these questions seriously and asks what worlds Indigenous literatures can create?

Term 1

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

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 different 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: climate change, pandemic, medical ethics, (neo)colonialism, racism, and inequity, among other concerns and injustices. Others explore the intimacies of private crises over relationships, identity, responsibilities, family, illness, grief, mourning, 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.

Term 1

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Why Fairy Tales Still Matter

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? 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.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

In this section of English 100, we will examine a taster of different genres of English literature, including Afrofuturism and speculative fiction, Indigenous life writing, fantasy and children’s literature, as well as classic works of Victorian sensational fiction, and comedy. The path to selfhood takes unexpected turns as protagonists encounter lessons from ghosts and monsters, confront or try to escape alternate or entirely imaginary versions of themselves, and generally avoid the familiar and the conventional. In addition to our core texts, we will read some short works and excerpts, as well as scholarly essays that provide contexts and theoretical frameworks to guide our own analysis of the texts. Students will be trained in introductory critical literary analysis, research and academic writing through writing short essays. This course encourages active learning through presentations, team work and flipped classroom exercises. Our core texts will include the following:

• Richard Wagamese. One Native Life. Excerpts. Available through UBC Library.
• Rivers Solomon. The Deep. Saga Press.
• Neil Gaiman. The Graveyard Book. HarperCollins Press.
• R.L. Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Broadview Press.
• Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest. Broadview Press.

Term 1

TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

In this section of English 100, we will examine a taster of different genres of English literature, including Afrofuturism and speculative fiction, Indigenous life writing, fantasy and children’s literature, as well as classic works of Victorian sensational fiction, and comedy. The path to selfhood takes unexpected turns as protagonists encounter lessons from ghosts and monsters, confront or try to escape alternate or entirely imaginary versions of themselves, and generally avoid the familiar and the conventional. In addition to our core texts, we will read some short works and excerpts, as well as scholarly essays that provide contexts and theoretical frameworks to guide our own analysis of the texts. Students will be trained in introductory critical literary analysis, research and academic writing through writing short essays. This course encourages active learning through presentations, team work and flipped classroom exercises. Our core texts will include the following:

• Richard Wagamese. One Native Life. Excerpts. Available through UBC Library.
• Rivers Solomon. The Deep. Saga Press.
• Neil Gaiman. The Graveyard Book. HarperCollins Press.
• R.L. Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Broadview Press.
• Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Earnest. Broadview Press.

Term 2

MWF, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

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.

Term 2

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

The Madwoman in the Attic: Literary Explorations of Madness

How do we define madness, and how can it be conveyed in literary texts? Who decides when someone is mad, and how is it linked to gender, class and ethnicity? When and how has madness been historically weaponized, especially against women?

In this course, we will study a range of novels and poetry from the nineteenth through to the twenty-first century, developing skills of close critical analysis as well as exploring the historical and cultural contexts in which these works were produced. We will also consider a range of theoretical and critical approaches to interpreting these texts.

The course will begin with Edgar Allen Poe’s classic short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart” (our token male writer!) and then shift to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella, The Yellow Wallpaper, skip forward to the mid-twentieth century to discuss Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, as well as a selection of her poetry, take another jump forward to Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel, Alias Grace, and wind up in the twenty-first century with Freshwater, a ground-breaking novel by Akwaeke Emezi, an American writer of Nigerian/Tamil descent.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Imagining Earth: Planets, Places, and Pasts

In this course, we will explore and engage with contemporary environmental concerns by asking critical questions about the relationship between humans and the planet we live on. These questions include: Besides the contemporary economic view of land as property, commodity, or natural resource, how have humans imagined our relationship to our environment? What are the boundaries between humans and earth/Earth? Why do some texts use environmental imagery as foreboding and apocalyptic, while others use it to figure utopian, post-apocalyptic resurgence? How does our language about environment — “the natural world,” for example — shape how we perceive it?

Taking literary texts in their critical and theoretical contexts, and working with periods from the Middle Ages to the present day, we will study representations of the relationship between humans and our environments. We will analyze, engage with, and respond to a variety of texts, including poetry, comics, videogames, and novels. As we engage with these texts, and with other scholars’ responses to them, you will develop strategies for writing critical, specific, and significant literary analysis.

Term 2

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Literature and (Re)creation

Literature is a powerful tool for recreation. Reading literature can be a pleasurable pastime that provides respite from the stresses of living in this world, even as authors use literature to help recreate this world, help us see this world differently, and help us imagine other worlds. This course will examine how a variety of stories, plays, and poems engage in and with (re)creation: how they depict recreation, people (re)creating themselves, and people (re)creating the world. Our texts will likely include William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, selections from Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Quiara Alegria Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful, Octavia E Butler’s Blood Child and Other Stories, and others.

Term 2

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

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
• J.M. Coetzee – Boyhood: Scenes from a Provincial Life
• Short Stories by Diriye Osman and Pravasan Pillay, among others.

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Making Trouble

We live in troubled and troubling times; our life-worlds are often characterized by disenfranchisement, social unease, and anxiety. Media and the literary arts represent that trouble, but also engage with it, whether to provoke or to ameliorate, to confront or to repair. In this section of English 100, we will read work that challenges our senses of self-understanding and of belonging in the contemporary world. How and what do we learn from texts that resist easy interpretation, or that articulate a staunch refusal to accept the terms and conditions of their given place? How do we make art in the wake of catastrophe and disaster? What are the risks and benefits of what the cultural and media theorist Donna Haraway has called "staying with the trouble"? In this section of English 100, we will examine the challenging work of five writers (Adrienne Rich, Kathleen Jamie, Kate Beaton, Alice Munro, and Claudia Rankine) to begin to think through the imperatives offered by unsettling, resistant, resilient, troubling art.

Students should be cautioned that the works on this course syllabus confront sexual violence, misogyny, racism, settler colonialism, national and class prejudice, suicidal ideation, and other troubling—and very real—issues; you should be prepared to be challenged and disturbed by what you read and witness.

Term 2

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

The Stories We Tell

“We’re all storytellers, really. That’s what we do. That is our power as human beings.”-- Richard Wagamese, Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations

Why do we tell stories? In this course we will explore the nature and significance of the stories that we tell—and retell—as authors, readers, and critics. Why are some stories more frequently retold than others? Why—and how—do some stories, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, become culture-texts, texts that occupy such prominent places in the popular imagination that they are collectively known and “remembered” even when the original works have never been read? What difference does it make when stories are based on actual historical events? What makes stories true? Some of the texts that we will be studying self-consciously question concepts of “story,” “history,” and “truth”; all raise questions about the nature of story-telling, interpretation, identity, and society.

Our texts: Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview); a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century illustrated editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Rare Books and Special Collections, UBC Library); Elizabeth LaPensée and K.C. Oster, Rabbit Chase (Annick Press, UBC Library ebook); Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (Vintage); selections from Tekahionwake (E. Pauline Johnson), Lixwelut (Mary Agnes Capilano), and Sahp-luk (Chief Joe Capilano), Legends of the Capilano (University of Manitoba Press, UBC Library ebook ); selections from Richard Wagamese, Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations (Douglas & McIntyre, UBC Library ebook (the ebook does not include the splendid photographs)); a selection of poems (all available online) by Susan Alexander, Sarah Howe, Roy Miki, Kei Miller, Theresa Muñoz, Arundhathi Subramaniam, and Alice Te Punga Somerville.

Term 2

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

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 tentatively 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.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a short primary-text analysis, 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.

Term 2

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available. Please check with us again soon.

Term 2

MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Thuggery across Literary Space and Time

The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines a thug as “a violent person, especially a criminal.” Merriam-Webster offers synonyms such as “gangster,” “ruffian,” “bully,” “goon.” Interestingly, Merriam-Webster includes “villain” in its list. What do the thug and the villain have in common? What do we really mean when we use the term? How does the term travel through space, time, and genre to generate ideas for contemplating place, race, gender, and personhood from the nineteenth century to the present?

In answering these questions, this course will challenge the received notions of similarity between both terms, on the one hand, and relocate the thug in its mytho-political origin in British-dominated India. Commencing in media res with a brief examination of the thug in popular imagination, the class will zoom out from this popular portrayal of thuggery to track the figure of the thug from nineteenth-century British literature to Indian historical and journalistic accounts of thuggery. We will examine the colonial power structure that determined the meaning of the term and identify the contestations inherent in its use in its origin spaces. Bringing insight from this historical account to our reading of the manifestations of the thug in contemporary African, African American, and Caribbean literature and popular culture (comprising sonic and visual texts), we will generate a more capacious working definition of thuggery that retains its originary implication of the British colonial enterprise and recasts it as a socio-spatial strategy.

Evaluation will include two analytical essays and a final project that requires secondary academic research.

Term 2

TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Bad Manners

What are bad manners? The idea of manners, broadly construed, captures not only what we expect from others in society, but also what we expect from ourselves. This section of ENGL 100 takes up literary representations of civility and decorum – and their (often comic) violations. Why, for instance, do we behave the way we do in social situations? What are the rewards of being polite – and of avoiding being perceived as rude? Does politeness come ‘naturally’? We will pursue these and further questions in a term-long inquiry into the unarticulated assumptions and expectations that underlie everyday social rituals and performances. Our texts include eighteenth-century insult poems, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, and short stories by Zadie Smith

Term 1

MW, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

400 Years of Humanity’s Big Questions

There will be shipwrecks, magic, mad scientists, beast-people, a garden party, and his first ball. As we read stories of wrecks and disasters—structural, personal, and social— we will consider the significance of the ways these stories ask some of the big questions human beings have struggled with for centuries: What makes us human and not animal? What is human nature, and is it really natural? What about gender, race, and other kinds of difference? Who has power and why? Along with substantial work on poetry, this section of English 110 will focus on one play, one short novel, and a group of short stories that engage the different ways that people respond to circumstances that challenge what they thought was “natural” or “universal.” This course introduces students to the analytical skills and critical thinking essential to university-level literary reading, thinking and writing. In large lectures and 30-student Friday discussion groups, students pursue hands-on practice of methods of literary analysis. Please note that this is not a course on writing (that’s ENGL 100 or WRDS 150): we’ll spend our time on fabulous literature rather than essay-writing instructions.

And remember: UBC Law, Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, and Education all require 6 credits of first year English, so 110 will prepare you for lots of future paths!

Want a head start this summer? Choose HG Wells’ short and creepy mad scientist novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau or Shakespeare’s classic shipwreck+magic play, The Tempest. You can see videos of different productions of Tempest for free through the UBC library or stream the great 2010 film, starring Helen Mirren and Djimon Hounsou.

Term 1

MW, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

After Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is by far the most influential work of literature in the English language. It has inspired plays, films, video games, comics, cartoons, stand-up comedy, dolls, cereals, and all manner of science-fiction, horror, and fantasy stories and novels. Many of these adaptations, including the most recent, have brought the concerns of their own time to bear on Shelley’s tale of scientific overreach, monstrosity, guilt, and rejection: these concerns include colonialism, racism, sexuality, artificial intelligence, the nature of life, birth, death, and society. But adaptations also enable us to see in critical and cultural perspectives, how such thorny issues, and our approaches to them, have evolved over time and alongside developments in artistic and other technologies. This course is thus about literary adaptation, but it is also about the histories and assumptions from which these adaptations, and our responses to them, emerge. After reading Shelley’s original novel, we will explore a selection of adaptations of Frankenstein, including the first dramatic adaptation of the novel, Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein (1823), James Whale’s early cinematic masterpieces Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), two novels, Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) as well as Yorgos Lanthimos and Tony McNamara’s recent award-winning film adaptation of it (2023), and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013), and ending with Victor Lavalle’s disturbing but profound graphic novel, Destroyer (2022). Assignments will include short responses, quizzes, essays, and a final exam.

Please note: Frankenstein is a work of horror and, while it is not particularly graphic itself, many of its more recent adaptations have used it to probe challenging issues of violence, sexuality, racism, and war. These and other related issues will be discussed sensitively but openly in lectures and tutorials. Please be prepared.

Term 1

MW, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

We’ll read plays, short stories, and poems from a range of periods in order to consider how texts work and how we can speak and write about them. The plays are William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog. We’ll read short stories from the last (almost) 200 years and poems from the last (almost) 500) years.

Term 1

MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Literature and the Media

This course provides students with an understanding of relationships between literature and media. It further provides them with an understanding of literary genre, and of the ways in which different media function. There are modules on electronic media and the book, on information culture, networks, surveillance capitalism, media metafiction, and on Indigenous cosmography. In addition, the course encourages students in reading and writing strategies that will enhance their ability to communicate ideas effectively.

Term 1

MW, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

What can Literature do?: 21^st Century Narratives and Counternarratives

Scientists use data—gathered through experimentation, for example, or measurement—to discover and interpret the world around them. What do literary scholars use? What kind of “data” is a graphic narrative, a novel, or a poem? And what can the study of literature tell us about how we interpret the world we live in? In particular, what might we learn from literature that we can’t learn by other means?

The texts on this course include local and global stories written in our current century. They will show us contemporary lives lived in different corners of the world—for example, a Pakistani university student in New York, an Ojibwe hockey player in Ontario. These are personal stories about public events, and they are the stories that have generally been less discovered, measured, or recorded. They reveal the sometimes invisible, even erased, narratives and lives that lurk behind the headlines or history books. They invite us to ask, who gets to speak and who may be silenced? What kind of knowledge does literature give us access to—and what should we do with that knowledge?

Possible texts include The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, Injun by Jordan Abel.

Term 2

MW, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

This course is intended to introduce first-year students to the aims and techniques of university-level literary studies by exposing them to literature written in a range of genres—poetry, drama, narrative—in a range of social and historical contexts. The course balances professor’s lecture-format presentations (Mondays and Wednesdays) with more interactive discussions with TAs (Fridays).

This particular section of ENGL 110 will be organized around the relationship between works of literature, i.e. parody, allusion, quotation, homage. We will explore how allusions to both Broadway musicals and rap contribute to the meaning of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2016 musical Hamilton. We will explore Harlem Renaissance poetry’s engagement with poetic traditions through parody and allusion. We will then discuss poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen. The course will wrap up with Winnifred Eaton Reeve’s novel Cattle, which cites conventions of the Western genre.

Readings will include:

• Hamilton: The Musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda
• Winnifred Eaton Reeve’s 1923 novel Cattle
• Selected poems by Shakespeare, Harryette Mullen, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks

Term 2

MW, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Visions of the End: Reading the Apocalypse

Western culture has long been obsessed with the end. From Noah’s Flood to the Christian Apocalypse, the medieval millennial terrors of the year 1000 to the tech-panic of Y2K, narratives of ‘how it all ends’ are varied in scope and cause, but always present with us. In this course we will read a series of  texts that engage with a number of potential 20^th and 21^st century apocalyptic existential threats, from nuclear war to pandemics, from zombies to climate change. As much interested in the social implications of disaster as they are in its physical impacts, these novels offer not only warnings, but also hope in the human capacity for survival and reimagination.

Term 2

MW, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

The Body at the Border

This course introduces students to methods for studying literature, media, and critical theory by focusing on the body’s relationship to borders.
In particular, we will examine how borders in their various forms are represented, interrogated, or reimagined in contemporary North American and diasporic literature and media. We will focus on the relationships between race, gender, sexuality and narratives of migration that illuminate ongoing histories of imperialism and settler colonialism. The course uses the frameworks of literary theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and diaspora studies in order to attend to formal and thematic components of cultural productions, and to put them in conversation with questions about borders and migration. Students will develop skills essential to university-level reading, writing, and critical analysis.

Term 2

MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Literature for a Warming World

  “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, address to the United Nations General Assembly, 2019

When we think about climate change, we may feel torn between concern for the fate of our planet and our desire for an unending supply of consumer goods. Depending on our politics, respect for scientific expertise, and ecological sensibility, we are likely to admire figures like Greta Thunberg or throw our lot in with her critics and plead the necessity of continued economic growth. Wherever our allegiances lie, we may wonder what potential worlds await us. In this course we will read a variety of literary representations of worlds altered by climate change. Readings will include a selection of poems and short stories, Catherynne M. Valente’s 2021 novel The Past is Red, and Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 film Snowpiercer.

Term 2
MW, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Strange Science, Monsters, Robots, and Literary Theory

In this section of English 110, we will read literary texts depicting strange science and artificial life. The course will teach you to think and write critically about literature at the university level. It will also introduce you to contemporary literary theories. We will examine a range of approaches to the interpretation of literature, including Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial, and use the theories to analyze the literature we study. Texts read will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil,” and Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).

Term 2

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Narratives of Creativity

In this course, we will examine the relationship between storytelling, artistic innovation, and the notion of creativity itself. Spanning a range of literary genres and cultural contexts, this course delves into how creativity has been understood, celebrated, and contested throughout history, from traditional notions of literary and artistic creation to contemporary forms of expression.

Through close readings —from the poems of Emily Dickinson to the visual works of Youtube “content” creators – we will consider how narratives of creativity reflect broader cultural, philosophical, and technological shifts. Key themes include the role of the “creator” in society, the tension between originality and imitation, and the social and political contexts in which culture gets made.

What is creativity and why is it so important in human life?  How does society encourage or discourage human creativity?  What are the relationships between creators, their creativity, and their creations?  And how is creativity related to inspiration, feelings, imagination, innovation, novelty, skill, and even productivity?  What are the best conditions for fostering creativity?

This course also poses critical questions about the future of creativity in an increasingly interconnected and technologized world. How will AI, digital platforms, and global connectivity redefine the creative process? Can creativity be algorithmically generated, or is it inherently human? What is the role of storytelling in an age dominated by data and virtual realities? In exploring these questions, we will interrogate the boundaries of human imagination and the ways in which narratives of creativity are likely to appear in the coming years.

A full reading list and syllabus will be available on the first day of classes in January, but students might begin by reading the following poems: “To Make a Prairie” by Emily Dickinson, “Any Lit” by Harryette Mullen, “The Young Poets of Winnipeg” by Naomi Shihab Nye, “Trying too Hard to Write a Poem Sitting on the Beach” by Philip Whalen – which can be found on  poets.org and The Poetry Foundation’s website.

Term 1

MW, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Producing Consumable Texts: Exploring Representations of Food and Eating

With the popularity of The Food Network and social media, the pleasures of food have extended to consuming representations of eating and food production (e.g., foraging, harvesting, cooking). This course will explore diverse ways of communicating about food, including through personal essays, restaurant reviews, blog posts, recipes/cookbooks, food documentaries, and Instagram reels. This course will consider each of these genres/media, considering how their forms help convey particular meanings in relation to food. For example, how do recipes instruct readers about a particular lifestyle or ethos tied up with certain kinds of food and preparation? How does a restaurant review provide both critique as well as vicarious enjoyment for the reader? How do visual elements, such as photographs and video, facilitate the consumption experience? The course will also consider how issues related to race, colonialism, gender, and class can be subsumed in the eating process or brought to light through more disruptive eating and communicational practices.

Term 1
TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Rhetoric, Controversy, and Propaganda

How does everyday language work to influence our thoughts and actions? This course delves into the realm of rhetoric – the motivation of belief and action, which encompasses not only overt techniques of persuasion and propaganda, but also the quotidian aspects of language and symbol usage that facilitate (or hinder) our daily lives and organize society. In order to work on their own communication skills, students will study and implement argumentative, critical, and stylistic techniques by analyzing the rhetoric of contemporary and historical public controversies, such as the politics of climate change, the public function of science, and whatever current controversies fill the headlines this semester.

Term 2

MW, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Body Language: Life Writing of Survival and Resilience

Imagine a devastating car crash has left you trapped inside your own body, and you are only able to communicate with the outside world through a series of eye blinks. How would you tell your story? How would you make sense of your suffering? This section of English 111 will investigate how we can understand the language and communication that make life narratives so moving, persuasive, and inspiring. We will apply a combination of literary, rhetorical, and cultural perspectives to a wide array of life writing from ordinary people who describe their extraordinary lived experiences, ranging from narratives about sickness, to racial oppression, to survival after a plane crash. In an age when Artificial intelligence threatens to replace us, this course reminds us that the human capacity to tell our stories can never be replicated.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
CO-TAUGHT WITH LING 140

What can we believe of what we hear and read about language?
Is language change bad?
Do some people have “good grammar”?
Does language shape thought and/or culture?
Are young people destroying the language?
Is texting destroying the language?
Is learning a language easier for kids?
Does your ability to learn a language reflect your intelligence?
Is all thought linguistic?
Where in your brain is language located?
Do bilinguals have an advantage or are they disadvantaged?

In this course, we critically examine a broad range of commonly held beliefs about language and the relation of language to the brain and cognition, learning, society, change and evolution. Students come to understand language myths, the purpose for their existence, and their validity (or not). We use science and common sense as tools in our process of “myth-busting”. The course textbook is Abby Kaplan, Women talk more than men … and other myths about language explained. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), which is available for purchase from the Bookstore or online through the UBC Library.

This course is an excellent introduction for students contemplating the English Language Major as well as an appropriate elective for students already in the English Language or Language & Literature Major or Language Minor.

Course evaluation is based on two examinations, a written project (pairs or groups), participation and attendance, and low-stakes short weekly writing. For the project, students select a language myth discussed in popular media (online, newspaper, etc.). Based on scholarly readings concerning the myth as well as material covered in class, they “bust” or confirm the myth.

This course is cross-listed as Linguistics 140 and is co-taught by instructors from the English and Linguistics Departments.

Note:This course does not fulfill the university writing requirements or the literature requirement in the Faculty of Arts.

Term 1

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Moving Histories, Travelling Texts

How can Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, the story of two Ghanaian sisters in the 18th century, speak to Lee Maracle’s “Goodbye Snauq,” a retelling of the formation of what we now call “Kitsilano?” What might the opening howl of Beowulf have to say to the teenage djinns of Mati Diop’s Atlantics? Where might the speaker of William Wordsworth’s “I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud” encounter the wandering, lonely narrator of Open City?

This team-taught course brings a diverse range of novels, poems and films together to think about historical and contemporary experiences of migration and movement. Together we’ll investigate literature’s ability to trace a counter-history of migration: what solidarities and connections emerge from histories of loss and displacement?

Term 1

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Narrating Place

What does it mean to write a place? What does it mean to write in a place? How does literature simultaneously impact and be impacted by the very geographies that it narrates? How do literary writers engage with the environment and even the current climate crisis?

This section of ENGL 200 will engage with these questions of the literary production of place, and the impact that these places have on the literature that comes from them. Places are constructed via multiple stories, often contradictory and interacting complexly with each other, layering stories to produce deep narrative maps.

Students will read a range of texts - poems, short stories, and novels - that engage with the complex histories of place across a range of different temporal and geographical contexts, from the misty isles of post-Roman England to 20th century South Africa, from the shores of the Caribbean to our own contemporary moment on the Pacific coast of Western Canada.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

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 diverse range of literary texts across time that engage with ideas of making and unmaking. Our explorations might include works 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 will be celebratory, some apocalyptic; all of them show the power of literature to reflect the human experience in profound and unforgettable ways.

Term  1 - 2

TR, 9:30 PM - 11:00 PM

Networks and Exchange in English Literature

English 210 is a six-credit course for Honours students, intended as a foundation for advanced study. Over the course of the year, we will read a wide range of literatures written in English, and we will think about the ways that creators and critics have responded to these texts, both in the past and in the present. The arrangement of the course is broadly chronological, from the Middle Ages to the present, though throughout we will pair texts that are in some way in conversation with each other. For example, early in first term we will read some of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales alongside modern responses from Jean Binta Breeze, Patience Agbabi, and Zadie Smith; early in second term, we will pair John Milton’s Paradise Lost with work by Neil Gaiman, Ursula LeGuin, and N.K. Jemisin. As we read our way through canons and counter-canons, we will think about the making, breaking, and rebuilding of networks of influence and engagement. We will think about what we read; how we read; how we talk and write about what we read; and why we often turn to the literary as a way of thinking through big questions.

Term 1
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
A survey of prose, poetry and drama to the 18th Century. For ENGL courses at the 200- or 300- level, prior completion of at least one 100- level ENGL course is recommended.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

The Stories We Tell—and Retell

Why do we tell stories? The very phrase “telling stories” is synonymous, to quote the Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, with saying “the thing which is not.” Yet most story-tellers are trying to articulate “the thing which is,” however they might define that in socio-political and/or aesthetic terms. In this course we will explore the nature and significance of the stories that we tell—and retell—as writers, readers, and critics. Why are some stories more frequently retold than others? Why—and how—do some stories, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, become culture-texts, texts that occupy such prominent places in the popular imagination that they are collectively known and “remembered” even when the original works have never been read?

As we attempt to answer these and other literary and cultural questions, we will explore the ideological assumptions—with respect to gender, race, class, sexuality, mental and physical ability, the environment, ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, etc.—implicit in our texts and some of their reimaginings, and in our and the original readers’ interpretations.

Our readings will be organized into four clusters: 1-3) Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast: A Tale” (1757), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and some of their twentieth- and twenty-first-century reimaginings; 4) twenty-first-century voices.

Texts:

Our texts and films will include: Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, “Beauty and the Beast: A Tale” (D. L. Ashliman, Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts); Angela Carter, "The Courtship of Mr Lyon" and "The Tiger's Bride"; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World's Classics); selections from Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Canvas); Bertha, choreographed by Cathy Marston, music by Errollyn Wallen (Joffrey Ballet); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview); Alice in Wonderland, directed by Jonathan Miller (Library Online Course Reserves, Canvas (only available during term)); a selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century illustrated editions of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Rare Books and Special Collections, UBC Library); Small Island stage play, based on the novel by Andrea Levy, adapted by Helen Edmundson (National Theatre performance and script); a selection of poems by Moniza Alvi, Sarah Howe, Kei Miller, and Theresa Muñoz.

Term 2

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

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. This course will introduce students to Canadian literatures in the genres of speculative fiction, examining some of the big “what ifs” being asked by Canadian and Indigenous storytellers today. We’ll read stories about climate apocalypse and consider the usefulness of imagining the end of the world. We’ll explore how the horrors of colonial history  have been reimagined into dystopian neocolonial futures. And we’ll take up narratives about monstrous bodies and posthuman figures that question what it means to be human. How do 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 engagement with both troubling pasts and challenges of the present. Our guiding questions will include: 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, Daniel Heath Justice, Doretta Lau, and Domee Shi.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Notions of Home in Contemporary American Literature

The idea of home has long been a fraught concept in American literature. In this class, we will examine stories about American homes from contemporary authors to consider what questions of belonging and space arise in such narratives. The authors we will be reading employ experimental styles in order to convey the complexity and provisional nature of such settings, and they call attention to the difficulties faced by various American subjects in situating themselves within both the spatial and temporal planes of the nation. Students will learn how to refine their writing at an academic level and to weave historical and theoretical research into their writing.

 Texts are likely to include Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer, David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System, Toni Morrison’s Paradise, and excerpts from John Ashberry’s Parallel Movement of the Hands.

Term 1

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
2024 marks 30 years since the formal end of South African apartheid, a system of white minority rule enforced with unchecked state violence. This course explores the ways in which writers turned culture into a “weapon of struggle” against apartheid and what happened to South African literature when that struggle was eventually won.
Beginning with prison poetry from the 1970s and 1980s, we’ll look at texts that exposed the cruelties of the apartheid state and imagined a radical future for the nation. The advent of democracy in the 1990s, and with it the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, provided a range of new possibilities for writers, but also a series of challenges that we’ll explore through a range of forms and genres. Texts include (subject to change):

• JM Coetzee - Life and Times of Michael K
• Zoë Wicomb - Playing in the Light
• Phaswane Mpe - Welcome to Our Hillbrow
• Short stories by Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele and Ivan Vladislavić,
• Poetry by Chris van Wyk, Jeremy Cronin, Dennis Brutus and Gabeba Baderoon

Term 2

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Literature in 4D

Our experience of time is a telling of stories. We use narrative to reduce life’s jumble of memories, experiences, hopes, and anxieties to a simple line that runs from beginning, through middle, to end. Fiction mirrors these stories we tell ourselves, selecting and organizing events to create the illusion of a stable, comprehensible timeline.

In this course we’ll encounter novels and short stories from a range of authors and contexts, working together to interpret them from various angles and perspectives. We’ll particularly focus, however, on the relationship between story and time. We’ll situate fiction in its own time and think about how to read it out of time. We’ll consider time travel, alternative timelines, backwards time (memory, history) and forwards time (prophecy, intuition, prediction). We will ask how time governs the lifespan and motivations of characters, the dread and anticipation of mood, the expansion or degeneration of worlds, and the existential considerations of theme. Most of all, we will examine the use of plot to experiment with time: jumping back and forth, speeding through a lifetime in a few sentences, or spending pages on a single moment.

Texts:

Texts will include Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (Wordsworth Classics, 1998), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (Dial, 1999), stories from The Broadview Introduction to Literature: Short Fiction (2^nd edn), and a graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred (Abrams, 2018).

Term 2

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

*This course fulfills the new BA Ways of Knowing: Place and Power breadth requirement

This course introduces students to literary and cultural representations of/intersections with practices of power in the context of the West Coast of what is currently called Canada. It emphasizes works by local authors from, about, or associated with Vancouver and British Columbia. Theories of place inform an approach to works by these writers that will allow us to examine literary Vancouver from a range of Indigenous, diaspora, and settler contexts. Our guiding question will be: How does reading “place”—including displacement—make visible the intimate and deeply felt ways dynamics of power are enated, embodied, resisted, and imagined by writers and/in communities? Students will read a range of writers from and/or engaging Vancouver in a variety of literary forms and genres. Assignments will position you in place and community, enabling you to examine place-based texts, mix critical and creative modes of inquiry, and bring student class participants collaboratively together.

Term 1

TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

How Language Creates Meaning

Expressing meaning is why we use language in the first place, but understanding how we choose the form of expression is not straightforward. In the course, we will learn how linguistic meaning emerges at the intersection of our embodied experience, our conceptual abilities, and our social and cultural context. To flesh out the meaning emergence mechanisms we will consider examples from grammar, structure of words, and multiple word meanings, but also visual communication and multimodal (text and image) artifacts. Through developing theoretical concepts and close analysis of examples, we will learn what it means to view language as a tool supporting conceptualization, in various communicative situations (advertising, internet discourse, commercial contexts, cityscape, and many more).

Term 1
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Indigenous Literatures, Through Time and Space

ENGL 231 explores the ways that Indigenous peoples have sought to overcome the legacy of colonialism and achieve self-determination through literary and other forms of cultural production and critique. This course will examine contemporary articulations of Indigenous identity, politics and cultural traditions in the field of literature, through the genres of the novel, poetry, plays/drama, film, and other modes of resurgent cultural expression. We will be examining both critiques of mainstream representations of Indigenous peoples in scholarly articles and readings, as well as Indigenous perspectives on popular culture, urban Indigeneity, history, politics, and contemporary struggles for decolonization.

Term 1
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

This course will critically engage the works of contemporary Indigenous authors from North America with a comparative perspective situated in the broad field of Indigenous studies.  We will read a variety of genres including poetry, fiction, non-fiction, short stories, novels, as well as criticism in Indigenous studies. Additionally, we will engage with non-textual forms of Indigenous literature, including oral storytelling, performance, and land-based story. The organizing questions for this particular semester are: What is the relationship between contemporary Indigenous literature and Indigenous politics and activism? How do Indigenous scholars and writers contextualize contemporary narratives culturally, politically and historically in ethical and creative ways? How do they address sovereignty, self-determination, decolonization and resurgence in their work?

Term 2

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Medianthropologies

While media studies has its roots in anthropology, this origin story has been relatively neglected until recently, gaining increasing attention that has culminatedg in the publication of studies such as Anthropology of Images (2011), Anthropology of News and Journalism (2010), Anthropology of Globalization (2008), Media Anthropology (2005), Anthropology of Digital Practices (2024), Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology (2023),  Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound (2018), and the 600 page Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology (2023), to name only a few. This course draws on the instructor’s Explorations of Edmund Snow Carpenter: Anthropology Upside Down (2024) to assess the anthropological beginnings of media studies before turning to an examination of various approaches to media anthropology. The course concludes with student panel presentations of media anthropological research into topics such as the UBC home page (ubc.ca), Indigenous media on campus, and campus surveillance.

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Cancel Shakespeare

Should Shakespeare be canceled? While Shakespeare’s works have long been understood as “necessary” reading, many question Shakespeare’s dominance within the study of literature written in English and his enduring cultural influence. On one side, some argue that there is still much to be gained from reading, watching, and studying Shakespeare; on the other side, some argue that Shakespeare’s works are carriers of racism, misogyny, and other forms of violence that we need to leave behind. We will read a number of Shakespeare’s plays—The Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Measure for Measure, and The Tempest—closely and use our close reading to examine debates on social media and in the news about canceling Shakespeare.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Parents Just Don’t Understand: An Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature

“I imagine everyone will judge it reasonable, that... children, when little, should look upon their parents as their lords, their absolute governors, and as such stand in awe of them; and that when they come to riper years, they should look on them as their best, as their only sure friends, and as such love and reverence them....” -- John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 1693

In an enormously popular and influential work that became something of a handbook for parents and educators, the philosopher John Locke presents an idealized view of the path from childhood to maturity. Some Thoughts Concerning Education was published just as a distinct body of writing for the young was beginning to emerge in England, and Locke argued that the books children read play an important role in their development. But Locke was also a bachelor who had little first-hand experience of children, and he didn’t anticipate the many ways that writing for the young would reflect the complicated and often fraught relations between children and their elders. This course offers an introduction to children’s and Young Adult literature, with an emphasis on parent-child relations. In readings, discussions, and lectures on children’s literature published in English, we will examine how changing understandings of childhood—and particularly of the relationship between children and their parents—are reflected in writing for young readers.

We’ll begin with a selection of classic fairy tales before turning our attention to recent work, including novels by David Almond and Neil Gaiman, and a graphic novel by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki.

Term 2

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

“From Instruction to Delight”: An Introduction to Children’s Literature

Literature written for children has evolved along with evolving concepts of childhood and the nature of the child. While didacticism continues to be a strong force underlying what is written for children, it has been modified by a recognition that children's need for play and “delight” must be acknowledged. Revolutions of the 18^th century were not only political:  when publisher John Newbery chose to publish books that delighted children and did not simply instruct them about manners and morals, he began a movement towards building a genre of literature that is familiar to us today in its use of imagination and play. In this course we will explore some early literature written for children, such as Newbery’s A Pretty Pocket Book (1844) and The History of Little Goody Two Shoes (1865), before moving to fairy tales, and the legacy of both in the young adult fantasy written over the last century. Our authors will include Rick Riordan, J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, C.S. Lewis and Neil Gaiman. Core questions we will ask in this course will focus on mythologies created through genres of children’s literature, and their effect on children’s ideas of the world and their place in it.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Racial Futures

This course engages contemporary literature, media, and theory that illuminate how concepts of the future are expressly racial visions. Speculative narratives are at once imperialist visions of control and prediction, and pertinent to radical imaginaries of a different world. We will examine cultural and scholarly works that bring speculative fiction, histories of empire and colonialism, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality into conversation. Course texts might include novels like Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl and Octavia Butler's Kindred; stories by Ling Ma, Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, and Nalo Hopkinson; poetry like Joshua Whitehead's full-metal indigiqueer; and films such as Boots Riley's Sorry To Bother You and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. (Please note that these are only tentative titles and authors, and that the course syllabus will be posted in Term 1).

Term 2

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Synthetic Humans; Posthuman Dystopias

“We make Angels. In the service of Civilization. There were bad angels once … I make good angels now.” -- Niander Wallace, Blade Runner 2049

“Whole generations of disposable people.” – Guinan, “The Measure of a Man”, Star Trek: The Next Generation (season 2)

The near-future and alternate-reality landscapes of science fiction are often terrifying places and have been since Gothic and dystopian impulses intersected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley’s landmark tale evokes dread in the implications of Victor’s generation of a humanoid Creature; this dread echoes in more recent products or accidents of science: clones, robots and replicants, artificial intelligences, cyborgs. Such texts raise issues of gendered exploitation, consciousness and rights, research ethics, and fear, in the realization that these creatures are, ultimately, not human but posthuman, yet often more sympathetic than their makers. However, despite their apparent superiority, such humanoids tend to be defined as commodities. In this course, we will consider the posthuman element of dystopian speculations reflecting on the present and recent past, especially concerning threats of mass surveillance, profit-motivated technology, environmental crisis, and redefinitions of human identity.

Core texts tentatively include William Gibson, Neuromancer; Madeline Ashby, vN; Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, The Matrix: Shooting Script; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go or Klara and the Sun; Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve) plus possibly one other film (or shooting script) or one other novel.

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.

Term 1
MWF,  11:00 AM -  12:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

TR, 11:00 PM - 12:30 PM

Reading Surfaces

In this course, we will survey key texts in emerging canons of graphic media—hybrids and mixtures of comics, illustrated texts, cartoons, graphic novels, graffiti, visual media and other genres—with an eye to establishing our own workable critical reading practices. What do graphic texts tell us about the limits of literature, and about the relationships between art and popular culture? How has the emergence of mass-produced graphic forms and genres impacted on the ways in which we read, and on how we value and evaluate writing? What has become of our sense of what constitutes a book or even a page? How do graphic media encourage us to reflect on the visual, spatial and material forms of representation, in language and in other sign systems and mediums? How is graphic media's increasing popularity, its burgeoning readership, tied to certain conceptions of identity, subjectivity, sociality and literacy? How do comics help us to engage with social and environmental crises in our world? Texts for this course this year will very likely include Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze, Making Comics by Lynda Barry, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Ducks by Kate Beaton, Alien 3: The Unproduced Screenplay by William Gibson and Johnnie Christmas, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, and Secret Path by Jeff Lemire and Gord Downie. The course also includes a series of comics-drawing workshops, when students can learn to make their own comics. Students will also have an opportunity to write about and discuss their own favourite graphic media.

Term 1

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Vampires on Page and Screen: Transfusions and Transmutations

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.” -- Bram Stoker, Dracula

This course examines adaptations in something of the way vampire transformations work, by considering how elements of appearance remain but the resulting creature is always radically different. We’ll go in prepared, not with stakes and garlic but with the critical and theoretical tools needed to move beyond popular online discussions and enable consideration of ideological, political, and cultural questions arising in creating through adaptation a new and separate text in a different genre. Our approach will be more that of literary and cultural studies than film studies, as we consider why stories about vampires, the blood-drinking immortals of myth and legend - and more recently of fiction and film - fascinate us and their adapters, and to what extent visualizing them results a transfusion, a transmutation, or both.

Core texts tentatively include Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla plus one adaptation (ideally the 2019 eponymous film), possibly The Vampire Lovers), Bram Stoker’s Dracula plus two adaptations: possibilities include Nosferatu (either Murnau or Herzog), Dracula (1931; Tod Browning), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992; Francis Ford Coppola). We might also have a look at John Polidori’s novella The Vampyre (or at one as yet unadapted vampire story) and at one vampire film that isn’t an adaptation (e.g. What We Do in the Shadows or Only Lovers Left Alive). Film choices will depend on access through Library Online Course Reserves. As well, academic readings in theory and criticism specifically concerned with adaptation, as well as in Gothic studies, will be set and provided through Library Online Course Reserves.

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.

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Hard-boiled and Noir

Admiring French film critics coined the term “Noir” to describe stylized, moody, atmospheric, politically-charged, morally-ambiguous American films from the 1940s and 1950s about ordinary people who commit extraordinary crimes. These films were themselves quirkily and sometimes surreally adapted from Gothic, mystery, and especially “hard-boiled” detective stories from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that thrilled and inspired readers with tales of murder, mayhem, and daring-do—albeit in somewhat more lighthearted or comforting registers. Since in 60s, though, Noir has itself become a global phenomenon whose authors adapt its persistently sinister tropes of greed, murder, cynicism and cruelty to comment on the critical issues of their time, including psychic malaise, racial identity, class power, and gender violence. This course will survey hardboiled and noir fiction (and some films) and probe their aesthetic, psychological, and political implications. We will read several classic hardboiled and noir texts to define its modes and assumption and to differentiate them from other forms of detective fiction. We will also read some recent American and “global noir” novels offering fresh perspectives on the genre’s racial, gender, and class politics. Assignments will include in-class writing assignments and a final exam, but students will also have a chance to develop creative skills by writing their own hard-boiled or noir story.

Note: these novels and films portray, describe, and confront racial prejudice, gender violence, drug addiction, psychic trauma, and related issues in sometimes stark and challenging ways. Students are advised to bring an open mind to these texts and to be prepared to discuss the challenging issues they raise.

Term 1

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Dream, play, phantasy: Affect theory and literary criticism

This course seeks to do two things. First, it introduces students to some aspects of affect and object-relations theory as these have entered literary scholarship and the theoretical humanities in the last couple of decades. We will begin with Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), a classic text that influenced the practice of literary criticism in the twentieth century. But we will quickly move to departures from Freud that specifically critique the psychoanalytic theory of the drives. We encounter the work of Silvan Tomkins, a U.S. psychologist who develops a complex theory of affect and a phenomenological approach to affect as motivational experience. And we will spend time with the British school of object-relations theory, paying particular attention to the notion of phantasy in Melanie Klein, play in Donald Winnicott, and reverie in Wilfred Bion. Along the way we will explore secondary literature on affect, especially feminist, queer, and anti-racist critical work alongside these primary theoretical texts.

The second purpose of this course is to encourage students to experiment with a method, or a set of techniques, for literary interpretation that is guided by the affective experience of the reader. How might a careful phenomenological attention to affect and an analytic orientation help to ground criticism? If criticism is always reflexive—if it involves the reader in a process of examining their own experiences, positions, values and motivations—how will a criticism informed by affect theory keep things at once speculative and real, connected both to the text (or other aesthetic object) and to the reader?

This course is taught as a mix of lecture and discussion. In addition to primary theoretical work and other works of criticism and interpretation, we will read novels and short stories, and engage with films and television shows to see how affect theory can offer a promising set of tools for thinking across media form. We will also think about these literary and cultural artifacts as themselves proposing theoretical vantage points. Our learning objectives include:

• to introduce students to affect and object-relations theory
• to experiment with grounding interpretive techniques in such theories
• to maintain an open, reflexive, analytic attitude toward aesthetic experience

Term 1

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Blended Delivery

English 301: 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.

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.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Rhetorics of Science, Technology, & Medicine

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

What is rhetoric, and how do persuasion and influence work? How you can persuade your friends, family, colleagues, and strangers? Some of the most infamous historical intellectuals vehemently disagree about the answers to these questions, but taken together, their answers provide a blueprint for rhetorical theory. By reading and applying rhetorical theories advanced by important thinkers in major epochs of world history, students will learn about how rhetoric was supposed to function in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient China, medieval Arabia, and elsewhere, as well as how these theories still function (or not) today.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
Hybrid Delivery

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

In the English 319 course we follow the development of English from the time of the Norman Conquest to the present day. In terms of the diachronic study of language, the course provides an overview of the historical evolution of English from the Middle English period (1100-1500) through the Early Modern English Period (1500-1800) to the Late Modern English Period (1800-21^st century). In each period, we study the changes in linguistic structure in terms of the sounds of the language and their relationship with spelling (phonology and graphology), words, including principles of word formation (morphology), loanwords, relevant aspects of word classes (the lexicon), word meaning (semantics) and sentence structure (syntax), with a view to learning about the dynamic, ongoing development and creative flexibility of the English language. The approach taken in the course is descriptive and is not situated exclusively in any specific linguistic theory.

Since the course aims at enabling students to grasp and describe the significant linguistic changes from one historical period to the next, students will be required to acquire a working knowledge of

• the International Phonetic Alphabet and
• English morphology and syntax.

There is an emphasis in this course on sustained practicing what you are learning by analyzing and describing a substantial number of examples throughout our study of the historical periods from Middle English up to present-day language use.

Required textbook: Brinton, Laurel J. & Leslie Arnovick. The English Language: A Linguistic History. 3^rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2017.

Term 1
Online Asynchronous

English 321 is a fully asynchronous online course. It offers an introduction to English grammar and its use in everyday communication. Taking a descriptive stance towards the rules of grammar and language variation, we work with examples from written and spoken language used in various formal and informal situations. Our study starts with words and their parts, proceeds to word classes, phrases and clauses, and concludes by considering different communicative functions that grammatical structures can perform when we package information in particular ways. This course:

• equips students with skills for identifying and describing the effects of derived structures in various communicative situations by means of the study and description of numerous diverse examples,
• provides a strong basis for further study of the English language, language variation, literary and non-literary communication and style, and
• provides essential preparation for students planning to teach English at any level.

In ENGL321, as in language courses generally, active and sustained engagement with the course materials is important. It is helpful to practice what you have learned at every step of your progress by completing the exercises provided on the course website and in the textbooks and to watch and listen in conversations or everyday reading for instances of application or non-application of the descriptive rules that you are learning in the course. The collaborative journal posting assignments provide opportunities to gather data and discuss the application of usage rules to real-life usage that you record (with permission of the participants) and describe.

Note: Although this is not a remedial course explicitly aimed at improving your own language usage, studying the structure and the usage of the language can have a positive, continuing impact on your ability to communicate effectively in English.

Textbooks

Börjars, Kersti & Kate Burridge. Introducing English Grammar, 3^rd ed. Routledge, 2019.

Leech, Geoffrey, Margaret Deuchar and Robert Hoogenraad. English Grammar for Today: A New Introduction. 2^nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Term 2
Online Asynchronous

This fully asynchronous online course is an introduction to the study of stylistics, with an emphasis on literary stylistics. The course starts with the definition of stylistics as the linguistic analysis of literary or non-literary texts for the purpose of reaching verifiable interpretation(s) of the meaning being communicated. We observe the significant shifts that have taken place in the development of stylistics as a discipline, while maintaining a steady emphasis on the linguistic analysis of literature.

We next consider what communication strategies characterize each of the literary genres. When describing and exemplifying current stylistic tools for analyzing poems, narrative texts and dramas, we indicate how stylistic analysis enables verifiable interpretation(s) and can prevent an untenable reading.

The course emphasizes the following actions to enhance your learning:

working hands-on with examples from each of the three genres by means of detailed analysis of the language of the text;

discussing difficult concepts and good insights with class members (you can count on also receiving input from the instructor); and

verifying findings by (in this context, small-scale) replication of analyses.

The high point of the course is the term paper in which students consider two to three findings reported in a recent corpus stylistic study on the writing style of a famous novelist (and Nobel laureate). You will be asked to replicate these findings in your own reading of a very short story or an extract from a longer work by the same author with a view to verifying your interpretation of the story.

Textbooks:

• Short, Mick. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. Longman, 1996.
• Simpson, Paul. Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students, 2^nd ed. Routledge, 2014.

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

The Language of the Media

There has been much interest recently in the impact that contemporary media (print news, social media and image-text communication) have on public discourse and public trust in information. In the course, we will study a range of language forms and communication genres to better understand the nature of contemporary public discourse and to build an informed approach to the communicative universe we live in. We will start by discussing selected language phenomena, such as types of figuration, linguistic constructions, and expressions of stance.  After establishing introductory concepts, we will focus on several case studies, looking more specifically at the discourse of major campaigns and crises (e.g. Brexit, COVID, climate change), political discourse genres (speeches and election campaigns), the role of post-truth phenomena, and internet discourse genres (memes and ads). Students will be expected to participate in in-class discussions and projects, engage with readings, collect their own media examples, and respond to take-home assignments.

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

This class focuses on “everyday metaphors”: the figurative language that we use all the time, over the course of casual conversations and throughout our lives, often without even realizing it. While we may think our colloquial use of language is mostly literal, we rely on metaphors to talk about all sorts of ideas and situations. For example, we may talk about “fighting” crime, “waging war” on a pandemic, or “battling” poverty. In all these cases, we are describing one type of concept - a serious societal challenge - in terms of another concept, physical combat. But what does it mean to describe a pandemic as a “war”, versus a “wildfire” or a “journey”? Not only are these types of patterns pervasive throughout our language use, they also influence how we understand these concepts.

In this course, you will learn how to identify and analyze figurative language in a variety of texts and media, and also consider the persuasive role of metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon. In the first part of the course, we will learn about various types of figurative language (metaphor, metonymy, blending). In the second part, we will apply these theoretical concepts to a range of genres, from health care to poetry. We will also consider the role of figurative language beyond the written and spoken word, such as gesture, memes, and other forms of multimodality.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

Identify and analyse figurative language in a variety of texts, genres, and media

Understand and apply core concepts in cognitive linguistics, including metaphor theory and frame semantics

Read and comprehend scholarly articles in the field of metaphor studies

Develop an original metaphor analysis and present it in spoken and written form

Engage in critical academic discussion with both peers and scholarly literature

Required textbook: 

Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser. Figurative Language. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Term 2

MW, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

This course explores and examines contemporary English phonology, morphology and lexical semantics. It begins with the study of speech sounds in English. We apply methods for phonetic transcription and study distinct sounds and possible sound combinations in English (phonology). We study the processes of word formation and word classification in English (morphology). We also study word meaning (lexical semantics) using a variety of approaches.

Upon completion of this course, students will:

• understand the English sound system, including sounds that are used in speech production and the rules and patterns governing their use;
• understand the rules of English word formation and grammatical modification;
• understand different approaches to representing and analyzing lexical meaning;
• demonstrate the ability to formally or diagrammatically represent this knowledge;
• appreciate the nuances of meaning in human language and the conceptual system underlying it.

Required textbook:

Brinton, Laurel J., and Donna M. Brinton. The Linguistic Structure of Modern English. John Benjamins, 2010.

Term 2

Online with Zoom meetings set by instructor
Thursdays, 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

The Structure of Modern English: Sentences and Their Uses

This online course focuses on the structure of modern English beyond the level of the word. We study how words and phrases are combined in English sentence structure (syntax) from a generative perspective. Our focus will be on both simple and complex sentences. We will also study meaning in sentences (sentence semantics) and how language functions in context (pragmatics).

Upon completion of this course, students will have:

• a knowledge of the structure of simple and complex sentences in English and the ability to represent this knowledge diagrammatically
• an appreciation of the nuances of meaning in human language and a knowledge of the conceptual system underlying meaning
• an understanding of the use of language in context.

Course evaluation: There will be 3 tests, 3 quizzes and a class participation mark. The tests are not cumulative. A variety of in-class, homework and test questions will be given, including problem solving, short answer, and multiple-choice questions, but the emphasis will be on representing English sentence structure diagrammatically.

Required Text: L. Brinton. (2010) The Structure of Modern English. (2nd ed.). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Chapters 7-11.

Term 2

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Media ecology in the Atlantic world, 1650 to the present

This course begins by defining “media ecology” as a “coevolution” among technologies, their users, the materials from which technologies are made, and the communities in which their users participate. It examines the history of the idea of “media” and “mediation” from the early modern period to the present, and in conjunction with kinds and sites of media and mediation typically overlooked in media histories, including Indigenous knowledge-keeping, ceremony, and diplomacy and Black community production and circulation of texts. The course is organized comparatively, bringing print and digital media forms into conversation, along with a broadened sense of what “mediation” is and might be. The learning design and assessments for this course draw on comparative modes of inquiry.

The course combines theoretical and historical reading and investigation with hands-on, project-based learning. You will investigate the historical development of knowledge technologies, broadly understood, experience and reflect on their practical use, examine them in relation to broader approaches to mediation and media history, consider what it means to inquire into the experiences and lives of those who have worked with and used technological forms and participated in other modes of mediation contemporary with them, and use digital and analog media to organize and explain your findings. You will also engage with media ecologies in a second sense, considering the relationship between media, their material qualities, and the resources and practices of the surrounding world. Finally, you will consider literary texts that reflect on their own relationship to media and mediation, bringing media historical questions productively into view.

Term 1

Online Asynchronous

Media ecology in the Atlantic world, 1650 to the present

This course begins by defining “media ecology” as a “coevolution” among technologies, their users, the materials from which technologies are made, and the communities in which their users participate. It examines the history of the idea of “media” and “mediation” from the early modern period to the present, and in conjunction with kinds and sites of media and mediation typically overlooked in media histories, including Indigenous knowledge-keeping, ceremony, and diplomacy and Black community production and circulation of texts. The course is organized comparatively, bringing print and digital media forms into conversation, along with a broadened sense of what “mediation” is and might be. The learning design and assessments for this course draw on comparative modes of inquiry.

The course combines theoretical and historical reading and investigation with hands-on, project-based learning. You will investigate the historical development of knowledge technologies, broadly understood, experience and reflect on their practical use, examine them in relation to broader approaches to mediation and media history, consider what it means to inquire into the experiences and lives of those who have worked with and used technological forms and participated in other modes of mediation contemporary with them, and use digital and analog media to organize and explain your findings. You will also engage with media ecologies in a second sense, considering the relationship between media, their material qualities, and the resources and practices of the surrounding world. Finally, you will consider literary texts that reflect on their own relationship to media and mediation, bringing media historical questions productively into view.

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

From Codex to Code

“Never judge a book by its cover,” we are often told, and yet we do judge books, not only by their covers, but also by their typefaces, their illustrations, where they are filed in the bookstore or the library, and by any number of other factors not apparently directly related to their content. This course will introduce students to book history, a discipline that tries to unravel the complex relationships between particular books, the texts they contain, the cultures that produce them, and the readers who encounter them. D.F. McKenzie famously described bibliography as the sociology of texts. As we move through important moments in the history of book production, we will explore how materiality and meaning interact, in a range of historical and cultural contexts. Students will learn about the many forms texts have taken over the centuries, from oral recitations to ebooks, and everything in between. A feature of this course is hands-on experience with UBC’s collections: roughly every other week, we will visit the Irving K. Barber Library to explore materials from Rare Books and Special Collections. Course assignments will facilitate individual, curiosity-driven research with these materials.

Term 1

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Old English Language and Translation

“You must remember we knew nothing of [Old English]; each word was a kind of talisman we unearthed…And with those words we became almost drunk.” –Jorge Luis Borges, “Blindness”

Old English, the earliest form of English, offers an uncanny sensation: so different from present-day English that it must be studied as a foreign language, it is an ancestor whose patterns reveal themselves quickly to the learner. Old English literature is strange, intimate, and violent: a general falls into his bed after a woman’s brutal swordstroke; a feud erupts at a wedding; a tree, torn from the wilderness to become an unwilling instrument of torture, clings to Christ in what Borges calls a lovers’ embrace. This literature is usually read in translation, but in this class you will begin to read it in the original. You will learn the fundamentals of Old English grammar, syntax, and vocabulary; specialized poetic vocabulary and the basic rules of poetic composition; and unusual features that have been lost in the journey from Old to present-day English.

Term 2

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

A man falls asleep, his bed beneath a hung shield of bright wood.
Who made it for him? Who will remember it after tonight?
He goes to sleep for the last time, brimful from feasting, glad
for his bed, his armor set above him, a scarecrow to the night.

Identical under a blanket to the rest, but not quite the same—he
Squinted
when he laughed, he had a crooked thumb…

…This one would pay dearly for his beauty sleep,
for out in the dark, something of Grendel was waiting.

(Meghan Purvis, “Grendel’s Mother”)

How far can you go in translating a thousand-year-old poem? How do you balance relevance and authenticity? What does it mean to translate Beowulf into other platforms—to screen, graphic novel, performance, fan fiction, musical score, X thread? How do ethical translators reckon with the racist, sexist and imperialist history of Beowulf interpretation? This course on the many lives of Beowulf is also a course in the theory and practice of literary translation. Primary texts include Beowulf translations by Thomas Meyer, Seamus Heaney, and Meghan Purvis; we will also read widely in contemporary theory and criticism.

Previous study of Old English not required.

Term 1

Online Asynchronous

Love and Honour: Medieval Chivalry and Courtly Love 

The courtly poetry of medieval Europe develops out of a vibrant reimagining of elite culture in the twelfth-century that spread like wild-fire across the courts of Europe. The development of the entwined ideologies of chivalry and courtly love (fin amour) create an environment that produces some of the masterpieces of European literature. This course examines these two social phenomena from their origins in the twelfth-century court culture exemplified by the poetry of Chrétien de Troyes, Andreas Capellanus, and others, through to the flourishing of literary activity in the world of fourteenth-century England.

We will read a range of medieval texts, some in modern translation and some in the original Middle English, ranging from Chrétien’s Lancelot, selections from chivalric manuals, secular and religious love lyrics, Sir Perceval of Gales, to the popular romance The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnall. Finally, as the capstone text of the course, we read the alliterative Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a complex meditation on honour, love, the natural world, and the search for human perfection. This classic text, long central to the canon of English literature, will be examined through lenses both traditional and contemporary, asking not only what it meant in its fourteenth-century context, but what it continues to mean to us today in our own time of cultural and environmental crisis.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A World of Words and a Sea of Stories

With the help of a reader-friendly edition and a series of structured but gentle lessons, you will acquire facility in reading Chaucer’s Middle English. More importantly, you will learn how Chaucer makes use of his language’s power in assembling a series of narratives ostensibly told by the diverse company of pilgrims he met on the way to Canterbury. The pilgrims’ tales create a conversation about many themes, including class, love, sex and gender, work, language, the nature of narrative itself, and the pleasures and travails of studenthood, and our class meetings will reflect the collection’s spirit with regular sessions of open discussion. We will consider the linguistic and literary innovations that led readers to consider Chaucer the “father of English poetry” together with the sense of humour – by turns satirical, bawdy, and self-deprecating – that makes reading his poetry a constant joy.

Term 2

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

In this course we’ll read Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, one of the greatest of Renaissance epics. We’ll make our way slowly and steadily through all six books. Although there will be some discussion of religion and politics (hard to separate when Spenser wrote), our main focus will be on the Faerie Queene as poetry.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Shakespeare and the Idea of the Nation

What is a nation? What does it mean to be, and how does one become, a part of a nation? These are certainly important questions now, and they were equally important in Shakespeare’s day as England was still establishing itself as a sovereign nation. We will read works by Shakespeare and examine the nation as a category of belonging and exclusion that intersects with concerns about race, gender, sexuality, and language. We will read Titus Andronicus, “The Henriad” (Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V), The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Cymbeline. Class assignments will include short papers, a close reading assignment, and a research-based final project.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Mediatic Shakespeare

This course provides a unique approach to selected plays by Shakespeare through its focus on Shakespeare’s media—orality, script, and print—and the dramatization of these media in his plays during the period when the dominant medium was shifting from orality to literacy. The course also provides students with an introduction to media theory. The historical background of Shakespeare’s era is further developed through student panel presentations on topics relevant to the media context of Shakespeare’s time, including music, scribal practices, printing, and education.

Term 2
Online Asynchronous

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1
MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Political Bodies, Social Selves: 17^th century Literature

17^th century England was a culture good at creating crisis: for itself, in its civil wars, and then for others, in its rapidly expanding colonialism.  This was also a world fascinated by women’s powers, gender-fluid performance, unruly workers, the idea of trees, the mysteries of the spirit, and the meaning of community.  With a king who called himself the nursing mother of the nation, and exploitative cooperatives doing deals in India, with sermons described as “a making love to the congregation” and poems imagining Indigenous peoples as the new Adam, 17^th century English literature is packed with startling, complex, and important moments in the making of Englishness, Whiteness, gender, and citizenship.  Violent, sexy, and witty, painful, nostalgic, and vivid, this literature speaks to our world in its own powerful and troubled voices.

Course-modules will include Class and Social Satire; Religious Believing; Violence and the Stage; Misogyny and Romance; Rhetorics of Early Colonialism; Myths of the Citizen. We’ll read pastoral satires, country-house poems, civil-war debates, blood-tragedies, amorous verse, and religious confessions (Amelia Lanyer; John Donne; Mary Wroth; John Webster; Ben Jonson; Walter Ralegh; Oliver Cromwell; Thomas Hobbes; Katherine Philips).

The course will be as interactive as I can make it: workshops, discussion, collaborative projects, group-work.  You’ll have a custom anthology, no midterm, and lots of choice in your writing projects.

Term 1

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

The only text in this course is Milton’s Paradise Lost. We’ll move through it fairly slowly. Our primary focus will be on the poem as poetry. No prior experience with Christianity or the Bible is necessary.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Regulating Fantasy: Unruly Imaginations and Supervisory Education in Eighteenth-Century Children’s and Young Adult Literature

“Let me observe to you (which I would have you communicate to your little friends) that giants, magic, fairies, and all sorts of supernatural assistances in a story, are only introduced to amuse and divert: for a giant is called so only to express a man of great power” --Sarah Fielding, The Governess, 1749

Plots of most eighteenth-century books for children and teens reflected the adult agenda of turning youth into well-behaved respecters of parental, social, and religious authority. The young, however, were not always as compliant as adults wished: both as characters within texts and as real-world readers, children appropriated their elders’ reading, emphasized apparently minor or incidental elements of narratives, and engaged in subversive modes of interpretation. Nowhere was the tension between the priorities of children and adults more apparent than in the anxious attention to the dangers of fantasy that marked contemporary educational theory as well as the texts and paratexts of writing for youth.

This course will examine eighteenth-century strategies for disarming the threat fantasy posed, from the role translators and editors played in legitimizing French fairy tales, to the London publishing industry’s attempts at rendering folk and fantasy elements educational, to the development of a model of supervisory education, though which wise adults corrected the misunderstandings of their wards and students. After a brief overview of the prevailing models of childhood in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, we’ll turn our attention fairy tales—the most fantastic literature widely available to youth. We’ll then examine writers working in second half of the eighteenth century—Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Day, and Mary Ann Kilner, among others—who incorporated fantastic elements at the same time that they attempted to regulate young readers’ interpretations.

Term 2

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Popular Culture and the Eighteenth Century

Studies of modern popular culture have illuminated the complex relationships that individuals and groups maintain with the larger artistic, political, economic, and social movements around them. Through detailed engagements with eighteenth-century popular culture, this class will work collaboratively to illuminate the relationships among high culture, women’s culture, and popular culture, and the ways in which the conventional masculinization of high culture constitutes the feminine as the popular. Recognition of the historically naturalized links between the feminine and the popular in fiction (both frivolous products of fashion, determined by performance and consumption) will provide a scaffold for our work in other literary and cultural contexts that have previously been regarded as separated by less nuanced boundaries of high and low culture, including blockbuster plays like The Beggar’s Opera, shocking fiction like Behn’s The Fair Jilt, and the literary hissing match around the pop cult  phenomenon Pamela (read in excerpt), and one of the most adapted of Regency fictions, Jane Austen’s Emma. While most of this course will focus on popular culture created in the eighteenth century, we will end with a section on the implications of eighteenth-century women in modern popular culture, including screen adaptations of Emma, likely including Emma (1996), Emma Approved (online, 2013) and/or Clueless (1995). But not the excruciating 2020 version.

Want to get ahead? Read Emma over the break and watch some adaptations—in March you will be glad you did!

Term 1
TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
British and Global literature, 1780-1830, from the period of the French Revolution to the Reform Act and the Abolition of Slavery in the British Empire. May encompass multiple genres and contexts. Credit will be granted for up to 6 credits of ENGL 355 and/or 359. For ENGL courses at the 200- or 300- level, prior completion of at least one 100- level ENGL course is recommended.

Term 2

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

The Music of Romanticism

The seraph-band, each waved his hand,
No voice did they impart,
No voice; but oh! The silence sank,
Like music on my heart. --Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (496-99)

While songs were among the most popular media of the period in British literary history we now know as the “Romantic” (1780-1830), British Romanticism is rarely considered to have been a musical phenomenon. This course corrects that oversight. Examining six major collections of the period’s most innovative and influential lyric genres—songs, ballads, tales, sonnets (“little songs”), melodies, and improvisations—we will dive deeply into the meter, rhythm, sound, diction, poetic devices and literary effects of individual lyrics. We will also contemplate how Romantic-era poets weaved musical forms into the silent medium of print, anticipating and encouraging a tension between the intellectual work of poetry and the populist spirit of music that persists to our own day. This will enable us, further, to examine the importance of music to Romanticism’s political impulses and to explore the ways poetic music opens up questions of feeling, environment, volition, desire, identity, race, sexuality, personal growth, and social order. Primary readings will feature poems by William Blake, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson, Lord Byron, and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL). Assignments will combine creative and critical skills through presentations, common-placing, adaptations, and reviews. Although much of the work in this class will be independent, students will be expected to engage closely and systematically with the form, mood, and above all the sound of poetry in class discussions and group exercises.

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

This course in early Canadian writing offers an introduction to some significant works in Canadian literary culture in English from its emergence in pre-Confederation colonial literature to its development until the end of the World War I. We will ask, how has Canada’s particular colonial history shaped what has been recognised as Canadian literature and culture? How have settlement patterns, geographical features, or political structures affected cultural production in Canada? With these questions in mind, the themes we will address in this course include: exploration, colonization and settlement; Indigenous and First Nations sovereignty; English-French relations; issues of race, class, gender and sexuality; literature and the telling of history; Canadian literary regionalism. We will address these themes and many other questions about the relationship between literature and national identification in an historically and culturally contextualised survey of selected English-Canadian poets, essayists, and writers of fiction.  

Term 1
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Victorian Literature for Children

This section of English 362 will explore literature written for children during the Victorian period in England. Important concerns of the Victorian period were the changing roles of women and working classes in society, Empire and national identity, and the influence of new scientific discoveries, particularly about the relationship between humans, animals and the divine. When we begin to think of “children’s literature”, we realize its slipperiness as a genre; in this course, we will explore a variety of genres tied to our core texts. Our core texts will be from the commonly-called “Golden Age of Children’s Literature”, and will be read also in conversation with some children’s literatures from other cultures. Core texts will include works by Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Kingsley, and George Macdonald, and will be supplemented by short stories and excerpts. Topics covered will include the use of fairy tales by the Victorian press, framing education in children’s literature, the portrayal of animals, humans and the natural world, the writing of colonial identity in Indian children’s literature and Indian press, and the influence of ancient Middle Eastern tales brought to England by travellers. This course will also continue your training in research and academic writing.

Term 2

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Middlemarch and Jane Eyre

When asked what she thought of George Eliot’s Middlemarch Emily Dickinson replied: “What do I think of glory”? A century and a half later Middlemarch was voted the greatest British novel in an international BBC Culture poll. Why is Middlemarch, described by Virginia Woolf as “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” so highly regarded? Why is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, ranked fifth in the greatest British novels poll, one of the most popular English novels ever written, inspiring successive generations of authors, visual artists, and filmmakers? In attempting to answer these and other literary and cultural questions, we will explore why – and how – Middlemarch and Jane Eyre have been canonized and examine the ideological assumptions implicit in defining literary works as “great.”

We will also explore the ideological assumptions – with respect to gender, race, class, sexuality, mental and physical ability, the environment, ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, etc. – implicit in the novels and in our (and the Victorians’) readings of them.

Our texts: George Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford World's Classics); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World's Classics). Try not to be too influenced by – put off by? – the Middlemarch cover illustration. Yes, we will discuss why we often judge books by their covers . . .

Middlemarch is 785 pages and Jane Eyre is 440 pages: please do as much reading as possible before the course begins.

Term 1

MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

The Origins of Science Fiction

This course explores the emergence of science fiction (SF) in a nineteenth-century climate of intellectual, social, and technological transformation. Though often viewed as a twentieth-century genre, the nineteenth century saw SF acquire its most identifiable themes — invented technologies, the encounter with otherness, imagined futures — and tropes — extra-terrestrials, space voyages, robots, the posthuman. We’ll discuss both canonical and lesser-known texts of the period, tracing the origins of SF in major social and intellectual currents including evolutionary theory, colonialism, rapid technological advancement, and an emerging distinction between professional and amateur science. Analyzing science fiction also opens novel perspectives on central issues and developments in the period: shifting perceptions of nature and the human, the conflicts and consequences of colonization, challenges to hierarchies of race and gender, mass literacy, secularization, socialism and utopian thought, and attempts to harmonize science with the supernatural.

Texts:

Texts will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, and Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self, as well as short stories from a range of authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells, and Begum Rokeya.

Term 2

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00AM

Haunted Landscapes of Gothic Modernism

“in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought” - Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Modernism was born out of seismic, revolutionary shifts in society and culture. World wars, political revolutions in Europe and beyond, murderous civil and colonial/imperial wars, economic depression, and successive waves of technological modernization offering mixed psychological and social benefits and injuries laid siege to assumptions that the world was in any way well-ordered or reliably understood. Its literature both reflects conscious innovation and experiment and sometimes opposes these passions for change. Its obsessions respond in complex ways to those seismic shifts in its representations of gender and sexuality, social structures, race and culture, in all cases often in terms of transgression.

And yet, in its drive to make things new, Modernist literature is often a haunted place: spectres of ancestry, of war, of places escaped from collide with the present moment, creating a dark, Gothic modernity. This troubled place will be our focus as winter turns to spring.

Core texts tentatively include Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (to be read as a Modernism precursor), Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison; D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; James Joyce, “The Dead”; and Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude” and “At the Bay”; plus perhaps one more work of short fiction.

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.

Term 1

Online Asynchronous

Modern Literature

Some descriptions of Modernism offer bloodless abstractions about formal experimentation, academic disruption, and reactions against conventional morality. This course concentrates on the wildly passionate commitment of moderns to changing the world, to finding new sensations and affects, to overcoming historical evils and biases, to appreciating with sincere admiration other arts, other cultures and languages, and other places. The practices of the literary avant-garde may be a kind of cosmopolitanism of the arts, opening borders between different aesthetic media, traditions, and forms, to correspond with the opening up of the planet’s borders through technologies of speed in movement and communication. This course analyzes Modernism through the lens of its discrete experimental literary and artistic movements, networks, manifestos, and performances. Topics include Decadence, the New Woman, Expressionism, Manifesto Modernism, Impressionism, Surreality, Psychoanalysis, Minimalism, Technological Modernity, and Graphic Modernisms. Forms include prose fiction, verse, and drama. Writers include Stein, Yeats, Rhys, Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Conrad, others.

Term 2

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

English 366 is dedicated to studies in twentieth-century literature. This section engages with texts that imagine different types of future society, both utopian and dystopian. Between the spread of powerful and dangerous new technologies and the rise and fall of fascist and communist states, the twentieth century was one of enormous political and social transformation. These changes prompted writers to imagine future societies as a way of questioning, warning about, and inspiring new forms of social and political order. We will read several utopian/dystopian texts, including four novels: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, and Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower. Alongside these novels, we will read several short texts, including critical essays that theorize the way science fiction engages with the real world, as well as examples of political thought from the twentieth century. Through these readings, we will discuss how writers and intellectuals thought about the future then and how we might do so now, as the twenty-first century seems poised to be another time of tumultuous transformation. Course requirements will include classroom contributions and several essays. Please note that many of these texts engage with mature and difficult subject matter.

Term 1
TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Contemporary U.S. Fiction

This course will examine in depth the conversation formed by five outstanding novelists and their varied takes on the mythologies, dreams, and systems undergirding U.S. life in the global world of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Texts will include:

• Don DeLillo, Libra (1988);
• Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (1990);
• Toni Morrison, Paradise (1997);
• Jennifer Egan, The Keep (2006);
• Chang-rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea (2014)

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

African Climate Fiction

What is African climate fiction? How does this genre of African literature and film engage the current climate crisis of our planet? What aesthetic strategies do African literature and film deploy to comment on the ongoing climate crisis?

To engage these questions, we will start by studying the configurations of human and other-than-human actors in African epics and folktales as well as other foundational literary texts selected from across the continent. Drawing on this Africanist account of planetary engagement, we will then explore key terms in African environmentalism and climate fiction as we define fiction broadly to include film and social narratives. We will then explore how African cultural actors’ investigations of multispecies engagements, the ethics of resource use, the so-called Anthropocene, and the concept of the planetary unsettle the colonial impulses that often lurk in the environmentalisms and environmental policies of Global North political and academic frames. We will consider the sorts of “environmental tragedies” that Western environmentalism links to Africa such as the environmental degradation in the Niger-Delta and African civil wars stoked to serve cold war actors’ resource needs. Just as importantly, and contesting the environmental affects and policies of Global North actors, we will also explore how diverse African cultural imaginaries challenge the Western narrative of environmental tragedy and that narrative’s weak capacity to track the connections of rural and urban spaces, and the logics of extractivism that often ride on Western rhetoric of environmentalisms and climate change.

Term 1

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

The Cold War in Asia: Asian American and Asian Canadian Responses

The period post-WWII until the 1980s is conventionally understood in the West as the Cold War. Marked by events such as the Cuban missile crisis, the war in Vietnam, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, these years are remembered as a tense time when it seemed that the conflict between communist and capalist democratic ideologies might result in the outbreak of nuclear war. At the same time, it is important to remember that these same tensions played out very differently in Asia and took the form of multiple bloody and violent wars.  This course will return to this historical period in order to rethink what is conventionally remembered in the West as a conflict between the US and the USSR as a struggle that also involved—and, indeed, was staged in—Asia.

By reading novels, a novella, poetry, and a memoir that move us through the Chinese civil war, the Korean war, the wars in Southeast Asia, and North Korea, we will explore the legacies of Cold War logics and the afterlife of the wars in Asia for Canadians and Americans. How do these contradictory memories and competing historical narratives shape how Asians in North America imagine themselves and are understood by non-Asians? How does what critic Jodi Kim calls the “protracted afterlife” of the Cold War continue to influence current conversations about migration, citizenship, and global events and politics? We will contextualize our discussions of these literary texts with critical and theoretical material and documentary films in order to think critically about these competing cultural representations and the narratives they produce.

Required Readings (subject to change):

• Samantha Lan Chang, Hunger
• Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker
• Madeleine Thien, Dogs at the Perimeter
• Souvankham Thammavongsa, Found
• Y-Dang Troeung, Landbridge

Additional theoretical readings will be available via UBC Library.

Course Evaluation (subject to change)

Participation - 10%

• Reading Quizzes (2x5%) - 10%
• Close Reading Essay (600 words) - 15%
• Creative Assignment (response + 600 words) - 25%
• Research Essay Proposal - 5%
• Research Essay (1800 words) - 35%

Term 1

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Storying Land in Canadian Literatures

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.
Inarticulate, arctic. --F.R. Scott, "Laurentian Shield” (1945)

Now, I’m going to tell you something
This stump—you think it’s a stump—
but that’s my grandfather.
He’s very, very old man.
Old, old man.
He can talk to you.  --Harry Robinson (Syilx), "You Think It’s a Stump” (1992)

The distinction between reading the land as a speechless space of "huge silence” and identifying with it as a living relation reflects differences between Western and Indigenous approaches to land and ecology. Land has long been central to the idea of "Canadian literature,” whose historical formation was supported by writers mapping onto ostensibly "new” territory beliefs about the sublime beauty or terror of a vast, unpopulated landscape—ideas like "wilderness” and "the North” that became tied to national identity, supported the work of "developing” lands and resources, and remain powerfully sedimented in national thought. These dominant narratives displaced not only the storied knowledge of Indigenous peoples who have lived on and with the land for millennia, but other complex relations to place and environment expressed by diverse peoples within Canada’s physical and social landscapes. In this class we will seek to understand how representations of land and non-human "nature” in Canadian literatures are mediated by these differences and implicated in the historical production of cultural sensibilities that have naturalized the claims to land and belonging of some while disavowing those of others. How does literature claim land? How has Canadian literature functioned as a discourse in the stabilization and destabilization of settler-colonial territoriality? Can literature write the land without exploiting it as a resource? How are contemporary writers re-storying the land and human relations with it in terms of decolonial and environmental justice?

In this course we’ll take up these and other questions as we develop a historical perspective on the complex, political relationship between literature and the land beneath our feet. We’ll explore a range of Canadian texts from settler, Indigenous, and diasporic writers—crossing multiple genres, spanning the early 20th century to the present, and ranging from the Pacific coast to the Arctic—that invite us to consider how land and literature intersect with (among other concerns) the politics of place, colonialism and decolonial resurgence, (im)migration, race, gender, urban space, ecocriticism, and environmental activism. In particular, our selections will invite us to consider what it means to read the land from our current location in Vancouver and BC, sites of natural beauty as well as complex struggles over land, sovereignty, and displacement.

Assignments are likely to include one short reflection essay, one research paper, a creative/critical project, a group presentation, and a final exam.

Term 2
Online Asynchronous

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Indigenous Futurisms

In this course we will consider the intersections between critical theory and Indigenous Studies to explore the notion of Indigenous futurisms. To do so, we will read and discuss a selection of diverse literary and cultural texts that engage with both critical theory and Indigenous thought and practice in nuanced and creative ways, from short stories and poetry, to films and art installations. This will include examinations of historical and contemporary texts, tensions, and dialogues, which is intended to foster an understanding of the broader social, political, and historical contexts from which these critical and theoretical productions emerge. We will investigate not only engagements between Indigenous and “Western" thought, but also between Indigenous and other non-western thinkers, including from the traditions of Black studies and other anti-colonial traditions of critical analysis.

Term 2

TR, 11:00 PM - 12:30 PM

Not Vanishing: Indigenous Literary Theory and Criticism

The past forty years have seen significant methodological and theoretical shifts in the scholarly field of Indigenous literary studies, moving from ethnographically inflected outsider analyses of culture and identity or as extensions of nation-state literatures to Indigenous-grounded concerns of peoplehood, land, language, and sovereignty in intellectual and artistic production. The range of literary forms, genres, issues, and regions represented in the scholarship has increased dramatically as well, as has attention to Indigenous voices in the archive, becoming more intentionally international in scope, culturally specific in concern, and expansive in consideration of genre and form across time and space. The demographics of the field have changed, too, now centring Indigenous thinkers among the field’s major theorists and recognizing imaginative experimentation alongside continuity of Indigenous traditions and grounded knowledge. This course will survey the field’s key intellectual and creative genealogies through focused analysis of two novels: Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko’s sprawling post-apocalyptic fever dream, and Real Ones, katherena vermette’s more intimate study of a Métis family’s grappling with identity politics.

Course readings:

• Silko, Almanac of the Dead
• Vermette, Real Ones
• Macfarlane and Ruffo, Introduction ot Indigenous Literary Criticism in Canada
• Online resources

Term 2

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Nostalgia in Post-colonial literature

This course introduces students to post-colonial studies through key debates in the field and a mixture of classic literary works and more contemporary texts. We will explore how discourses of gender, race and cultural identity are reflected in colonialist narratives, and we will study the ways marginalized voices have challenged the scripts of empire and settler colonialism. The theme of nostalgia, in particular, will allow us to focus on questions of time, history, identity, remembrance, and desire in postcolonial writing. Literary authors to be studied include Joseph Conrad, Derek Walcott and Jamaica Kincaid; critical texts include essays of Edward Said, Paul Gilroy and Gayatri Spivak.

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

This course will be an exploration of disease narratives from and about the Global South, aiming to analyze the intertwinement between the figuration of disease, sedimented histories of colonialism, and radical imagination in select narratives in the context of public health in the Global South. The term “the Global South” gained traction in the wake of the mid-twentieth-century decolonization across Asia and Africa by offering a terminological and discursive reorientation for existing political and economic categories, namely, “postcolonial nations” and “Third World countries.” As a conceptual tool, the Global South supposedly helps move beyond fixed geographical binaries while enabling an understanding of the lingering legacies of colonialism in the post-Cold War and neoliberal world order. Global public health is one of the fields that make manifest the colonial spectres underlying many international policies relating to the Global South. Experimenting with the epidemiological and cultural imagination of the inherent pathogenicity of the Global South regions, an expansive body of Global South literature makes use of such diseases as cholera, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS to interrogate colonial entanglements and/or decolonial possibilities for respective communities, which will constitute the primary readings for the course. Our readings will begin with a brief survey of colonial medicine and tropical epidemiology through select eighteenth and nineteenth-century literary and medical texts, followed by twentieth and twenty-first-century disease narratives from the Global South (e.g., by Gabriel García Márquez, Harold Sonny Ladoo, Amitav Ghosh, and Amir Taj al-Sir). We will read these literary works in conjunction with histories of biomedicine and de/colonization, rhetoric of medicine, and relevant critical theories under four core modules: tropicalization, biopolitics, securitization, and radical futures. The final list of required texts is subject to availability of course materials and will be confirmed on the first day of classes in September.

Coming of Age from the Margins: Youth, Migration, and Contemporary World Literature

Online Asynchronous
Term 1

This asynchronous online course draws on a range of texts from around the world to ask how contemporary literature has represented and responded to crucial issues that mark our experience of the 21st century. Focusing on the stories of young protagonists from a diverse range of settings, we will explore how migration shapes what it means to be young in the modern world, and how youth shapes our experiences of migration. Drawing on novels, short stories, and an autobiographical graphic novel, this course encourages students to think about questions of belonging, race, gender, and sexuality beyond the familiar frameworks provided by the nation-state and traditional literary forms.

Texts studied include

• Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai
• What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad
• Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
• Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

Term 2

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Moving Images, Moving Texts: Adaptation, Migration, and World Literature

“For me Africa is like the seas Melville missed so much.” – Claire Denis on Beau Travail

Modernity is defined by movement: movements of people, movements of capital, and the movements of narrative. What possibilities emerge when we bring these movements into conversation? Does the transformation of text into image, or moving image into text, allow us to rethink our relationship to migration, to contemporary history, and to cultural influence?

Drawing on a range of texts and films, we’ll look to bring together a range of otherwise distant people, spaces, and times into conversation. How does Herman Melville’s Billy Budd allow Claire Denis to interrogate the remnants of France’s colonial empire in East Africa in Beau Travail? Why might Nicole Krauss’s narrator in “Seeing Ershadi” be convinced that she has glimpsed the lead of Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry?

Other texts include (subject to change):

• William Faulkner - Barn Burning
• Haruki Murakami - Barn Burning
• Lee Chang-Dong (dir.) - Burning
• Susan Orlean - The Orchid Thief
• Spike Jonze – Adaptation
• Andreas Malm – How to Blow Up a Pipeline 
• Daniel Goldhaber (dir.) – How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Term 2

MWF, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Metafiction and Ontology in Contemporary American Postmodernism

One of the most noticeable (and intimidating) features of postmodern writing is its willingness to engage with pluralistic realities, considering how slippery the distinctions between categories like the real and the artificial can be. In this course, we will examine how different postmodern American writers working in the second half of the twentieth century have employed stylistic choices like metafiction and self-reflexivity as means of examining U.S. culture’s fraught relationship with language in the aftermath of the major historical events of that century. Student writing will involve the application of theory to literary analysis, and students should expect to write two midterm papers and a final essay.

 Texts are likely to include Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted, Toni Morrison’s Home, George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, and Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense.

Term 2
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Space, Media, Displacement

Foundational to the study of media is the concept of extension: mechanical media (such as the automobile) extend the body, while electronic media (such as the computer) extend cognition. The effects of media are thus spatial. As extensions, however, media also displace that which they extend; they are prosthetic in the way that they function. This course examines various intersections of space, media, and displacement, including colonisation, minimalism in art, utterance as outerance, dance as the displacement of movement, digital nomadism, and the new global history. The course will develop the notion of a spatial methodology, arguing that space is a mode of critique. This critical methodology will be applied to three literary texts by student panel presentations at the end of the course.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Bodies: Person, Flesh, Thing

The basic premise of the course is that bodies are natural and social, biological and cultural. We have our bodies and we are our bodies. Bodies are both voluntary and involuntary. Our current understanding that the boundaries of one’s self are coextensive with the boundaries of one’s body had its origins in the eighteenth century. Using a broadly historical approach, we will begin with Richardson’s epistolary narrative Pamela and John Cleland’s 1747 pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to consider bodily privacy and its invasions. From there, we will move on to slavery, judicial torture, and incarceration as systems that reduce persons to things and flesh. Readings: Mary Prince’s slave narrative The History of Mary Prince; Jean Amery’s memoir At the Mind’s Limits; James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk; and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Finally, to develop the idea that bodies are subject not only to intentional harm, but also to involuntary forces such as sickness or impairment, the class will end with a text on disability. Critical and theoretical excerpts will be drawn from the work of Michael Foucault, Hortense Spillers, Didier Fassin, Elizabeth Hinton, and Jay Bernstein. Requirements: regular attendance and participation; Canvas posts; short essays; and a final essay.

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Children’s and YA Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora

Term 2
MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Children’s literature addressing the lives and concerns of Black youth, both in Africa and the African diaspora, is a flourishing sub-genre. In this course we will explore a range of contemporary texts including Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, Kacen Callender’s Felix Ever After, Lawrence Hill’s Beatrice and Croc Henry, Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down, Adaobe Tricia Nwaubani’s Buried Beneath the Baobob Tree, Asha Bromfield’s Hurricane Summer, Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch. These very diverse texts explore issues of identity, gender, black representation, police violence, trans and queer experience, and include works of realism, fantasy, and a novel in poems.

As well as focusing on the core texts, we will engage with theoretical perspectives on children’s literature and YA fiction, and its increasingly fluid contemporary incarnations. Students will be encouraged to develop independent critical responses to both texts and theories. Assessment will include a critical response, an in-class essay, a term paper and a final examination.

Term 2

Online Asynchronous

English 392 is a 14-week course that will guide you in the study and approaches to some classic Western texts and approaches to children's literature. The focus will be on British fantasy literature, by authors such as Gaiman, Tolkien, Pullman and Rowling, but we will also explore some connections with texts from other cultures. Our fully asynchronous course is part of the English Online Minor program in the Department of English Language and Literatures, but is open to English majors and to students in other programs such as Education, Language and Literacy, and Library and Information Studies. You will be reading novels, short stories and scholarly articles on children's literature throughout this term, and you will be sharing your ideas both formally, in the form of essays, and informally, in the form of discussion posts, peer reviews and games.

Term 1

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Vancouver’s Coasts

Vancouver is a city of coasts. It is situated at the meeting point of a major river (itself the hub for a network of tributaries, infrastructures, and waterways), an oceanic basin (a sea, a straight, an inlet), a mountain range, and an archipelago. It is built on the unceded territory of three coastal nations. The complex stories of its beaches, estuaries, and harbours continually dog, confront, and challenge its image as Canada’s gleaming, and futuristic city of glass. Vancouver also shares a history of migrations and dispossessions with several continents to which it is attenuated by ties of commerce, culture, and conflict. What does it mean to live, work, play, a thrive in such a place? This course will offer an interdisciplinary, multi-generic, and multi-media survey of writing from and about Vancouver’s coasts, their ecologies, and their colonialisms. The literary component of the course will feature poetry and stories by Daphne Marlatt, Rita Wong, Wayde Compton, and Lee Maracle, accompanied by selected readings from the wide field of “coastal studies” and in connection with the many different philosophical, historical, aesthetic, and environmental approaches scholars bring to it. In addition, the class will visit several of the sites mentioned and discussed in our readings, including Spanish Banks, Kits Point (Senakw), Still Creek, and Steveston. Assignments will combine creative and critical skills though presentations, journals, discussions, and essays. Group work will feature prominently.

Term 1

T, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Multimodal Communication and Cognition

In this interdisciplinary course, we will look at the interaction between language, co-speech gesture (i.e., the hand movements we make while speaking), and other forms of non-verbal communication (such as making facial expressions, shrugging your shoulders, or nodding your head). Course material will draw from research in cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, psychology, anthropology, education, and other fields. Students will study how meaning emerges from combined linguistic and paralinguistic utterance ‘package’, and analyze a variety of data such as political speeches, news media, and talk shows, as well as everyday conversations. We’ll use English as our main language of study, but our English language data will be supplemented with evidence from a range of other spoken languages as well as signed languages. This will allow us to explore the diversity and universality of multimodal communication across languages, cultures, and linguistic modalities.

Term 2

T, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Discourse and Analysis

Discourse analysis is an important area within language study that typically involves exploration of a variety of linguistic features and functions to understand meaning making in texts.  Aspects of language use examined can include semantics, syntax, phonological and phonetic structures, lexical choices, conversation skills and narrative structure. Analyses typically involve systematic descriptions of texts or corpora, with a focus on understanding how language is used in context.  Analyses of discourse may also highlight how language use functions to construct and maintain social understanding of the world.  In this seminar, students develop skills in performing discourse analyses and in evaluating discourse analysis research.  Readings include classic and recent research papers in linguistic discourse analysis, with emphasis on information structure, conversation and interaction, hesitation phenomena, narrative analysis, multimodality and indirectness. A key part of learning discourse analysis is doing it.  Students will therefore collect and transcribe some data at the beginning of the term.

Term 1
T, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

The Culinary Imagination: Reading Culture Through Food, Cooking, and Eating

Food, cooking, and eating are biologically necessary and socially powerful: we produce and cook food to survive, but also to reinforce social bonds, to celebrate tradition, to evoke memories of home, to compete with other cooks, to impress the eater, and even to beguile and seduce.

This course will explore food in literature, particularly life narratives, cookbook selections, and films across different cultures and borders, from the transnational to local Vancouver contexts. The production of food is essentially linked to histories of empire, colonial power, capital, racialized and gendered labour, and ecological change. Our discussions will explore these intersections.

Readings will include selections from Gitanjali Shahani (Food and Literature), Amitav Ghosh (The Nutmeg’s Curse), Sandra Gilbert (The Culinary Imagination) , Monique Truong (The Book of Salt), MFK Fisher (How to Cook a Wolf), Cheuk Kwan (Have You Eaten Yet?), Fred Wah (Diamond Grill), and Austin Clarke (Pigtails ‘n’ Breadfruit). Tasteful excerpts from cookbooks by local artist Janice Wong and the local anthology edited by Brandy Lien Worrall-Soriano, Eating Stories: A Chinese Canadian and Aboriginal Potluck, will be sampled.   Films will include Gabriel Axel’s Babette’s Feast,  Juzo Itami's  Japanese "noodle western" Tampopo,  Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman, the restaurant  documentaries of Cheuk Kwan, and excerpts from the recent television series The Bear .

We will host some class dialogue with food writers and filmmakers, and students will be able to research local restaurants, gardens, or farms as optional final projects.

Multimedia examples of previous student projects for my food-themed courses can be found at the following Richmond Museum exhibit, “Our Journeys Here” (2017-2018)

Term 1

W, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Adaptation in/and/of the Eighteenth Century

King Lear as a comedy. Antony and Cleopatra as romantic melodrama. Classical epistle as erotica. Jane Austen and zombies. Eighteenth-century literature adapted classical and conventional literary forms in ways that interrogated contemporary cultural practice, and in recent years, the era has been a rich source of historical fiction and film. In this seminar we will examine the theory and practice of literary adaptation in the long eighteenth century. First, we will first use a combination of both modern and historical theorizations of adaptation to examine practices of adaptation in the eighteenth century, including poetic forms like the classical imitation, dramatic adaptations of well-known plays, and fictional retellings. Once we have come to terms with the cultural work being performed by the period’s own narrative re-inventions, we will skip ahead to modern adaptations of eighteenth-century narratives with text and screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. Adaptation studies long ago left behind worrying about fidelity to source texts in order to address both the critical implications of the choices made by adapters and the revisionist engagements of culture that are embodied in these acts of artistic dialogue.

Want to get ahead? Read or watch Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to get ready for Dryden’s version, or King Lear to brace yourself for Tate’s adaptation (free through UBC library databases!). Or (re)read Pride and Prejudice and watch some adaptations. Be surprised by the intelligence of the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but under no circumstance watch the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies film, which is so terrible it does not deserve even to be streamed for free.

Term 1

F, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Literature and the City

A promise of opportunity; a site of misery and alienation; an escape from the country; a space of deviance and crime—the city has historically alternately fascinated and repelled, a spatial locus that mediates the dreams and fears saturating our cultural imaginaries. This course will focus on twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and filmic representations of the city and the urban experience. We will take a broad global and temporal perspective: that is to say, we will read early twentieth-century modernist texts that sought to come to terms with the experiences of alienation and consumerism signified by the city; move on to consider late twentieth-century postmodern representations of city space as a site of futuristic technology and simulacra; and finally, turn to postcolonial renditions of cities in what is known as the “global South”—in sites like Johannesburg, Mumbai, or Lagos—to think about how forms of global socioeconomic and racial inequities are spatially reproduced. Texts may include Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent; Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight; J.G. Ballard's High Rise; Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities; Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow; Teju Cole's Open City; or Chris Abani's GraceLand.

Term 2

M, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

“The Hatred of Poetry” or Poetry and/in Crisis

This seminar will consider contemporary poetry – not only individual poems but also the “social form” (Harrington) of poetry: the genre itself. What does it mean to say one “loves” or “hates” poetry? How are our attitudes toward poetry formed by popular culture or school? To explore these questions, we will consider how poems respond to crisis—both public and private—as we also consider whether the genre is, as some warn, itself “in crisis.” Is poetry dead, as critics seem perpetually to declare? Where does it lurk, on what occasions does it emerge, and how does it function in our social and political landscapes? If Taylor Swift’s album, The Tortured Poets Department, is currently ruling the Billboard charts, what might that mean for poetry, its pasts and futures? Readings will include 20^th & 21^st century poems by John McRae, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, Jordan Abel, Claudia Rankine, and more, as well as poetry criticism by scholars like Alan Golding, Joseph Harrington, Stephanie Burt, Carolyn Forché, and Ben Lerner.

Term 2

W, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Contemporary Chaucers

In the first few weeks we will read a number of the most important and influential Canterbury Tales in a modern English translation. One focus of our discussion will be the range of sources and traditions, from Europe and beyond, that informed Chaucer’s writing of the Tales. We will then consider some of the best-known modern and contemporary adaptations, focusing on particular pilgrims and tales (the Miller, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner) and areas (including the African diaspora in Britain, America, and the Caribbean). Works we read together may include, for example, Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales; Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden; Marilyn Nelson, The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems; Kim Zarins, Sometimes We Tell the Truth; one or more collections of Refugee Tales by various writers. Class members will develop projects exploring the many ways that Chaucer is represented in the 20^th-21^st centuries: adaptation in fiction, including for children and young adults, and in poetry; stage, film, animation; translation; illustration; various kinds of allusion such as dramatic monologues based in Chaucer’s work and life. Each class member will give a presentation; there will be opportunities to present on Chaucer and his contexts, and on contemporary responses to his work.

Term 2

W, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Great Filters

The Great Filter, a term coined by Robin Hanson in 1998, is a way of explaining why there’s no evidence of extra-terrestrial civilizations. The idea is that in the course of evolution some obstacle arises that constrains (or even destroys) life before it develops the capacity for sustained interstellar communication or travel. If that filter lies in our past—for example, in the difficulty of developing brains capable of abstract reasoning—then humans might be extremely rare and lucky lifeforms who are on the verge of exploring a vast (but possibly unpopulated) universe. But if the Great Filter still lies ahead, then humanity might be on the verge of an existential crisis.

As mainstays of speculative fiction, Great Filters offer writers opportunities to examine present-day concerns. In this course we will read novels that use the idea of the Great Filter to comment on the priorities—and anxieties—of modern life. Some of these depict familiar apocalyptic scenarios: Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker takes place in the distant future after nuclear war devastates England, Greg Bear’s Blood Music chronicles the emergence of artificial intelligence from nanotechnology, and Catherynne M. Valente’s The Past is Red offers a deeply personal and heartbreaking representation of loneliness and hope in a post-climate-change civilization living on the Pacific Garbage Patch. Other novels are more whimsical. In Happiness, Will Ferguson imagines a very funny, world-ending contagion of self-help culture, while Jon Bois’ multimedia 17776 (What Football Will Look Like in the Future) imagines a world where the elimination of reproduction, aging, and death have resulted in a civilization devoted almost entirely to sports.

Note: The reading list for this class is still under consideration, and we may add one or two titles—and modes of destruction—to the above list. A full list will be available later this summer.

Term 2

R, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

All About Sherlock Holmes

This section of ENGL 490 (Majors seminar) will offer students the opportunity to explore the astonishingly resilient popularity of the greatest of all fictional detectives. Since his emergence into print in a British magazine in 1887, Sherlock Holmes has become a cultural icon around the world. In this course, we’ll be asking why, for whom, and to what end(s). We’ll read original (“canon”) Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle along with some non-original ones; we’ll also have a look at contemporary parodies and sleuthing competitors. Students will examine a multiplicity of Holmesian adaptations from the last hundred-plus years, and in the process we will embark on an investigation into the history of fandom and fan cultures. The game is afoot!

Term 1

T, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Asian Artificiality: Race, Matter, Circuits

“We’re so postracial we’re silicon.” -- Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning

The above statement conjures popular images of Asians and Asianness as simulacra (AI, cyborgs, dolls, robots, or clones) and links contemporary anxieties about artificiality in the information age to a history of Yellow Peril. Hong’s lament, while equating silicon or the silicon age with postraciality, also racializes silicon as Asian, suggesting that the materiality of computational and digital processes is racial. This seminar approaches Asianness’s apparent artificiality or virtualness as an occasion to rethink racial materiality within and against genealogies of colonial modernity, militarism, and information capitalism. Considering “Asian artificiality” as a question of race, matter, and circuits, we will engage theory and cultural productions that historicize Asianness’s seemingly mediatic nature within the ongoing violence of settler colonial racial capitalism. Texts may include novels such as Hari Kunzru’s Transmission and R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface; poetry by Larissa Lai, Franny Choi, and Divya Victor; films including Jennifer Phang’s Advantageous and Kogonada’s film After Yang; and other media.

This is a tentative seminar description; the course syllabus will be posted in Term 1.

Term 1

W, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Surge, Pulse, and Flow: Tending and Attending to Bodies

In this seminar, we will mix conceptual-theoretical work with practice-based research on media and literature to think about the aesthetics and the cultural politics of embodiment, particularly around questions of space, rhythm and sense. How do we come to keep time with ourselves as corporeal, material creatures? How are bodies framed, informed, and transformed by various registers of the rhythmic—social, haptic, aesthetic, diurnal, spatial, biotic, epochal? Investigating a set of six representative bodies of work—songs by Taylor Swift, stories by Alice Munro, comics by Lynda Barry, films by Alanis Obomsawin, essays and poems by Kathleen Jamie, journals and poems by Audre Lorde—we will consider the body as a representational and enactive network of troubled and troubling flows; we will couple these readings, listenings, and viewings with theoretically-inclined work by Annemarie Mol, Judith Butler, David Abram, Tricia Rose, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Isabelle Stengers, Dylan Robinson, and others, to begin to create a flexible conceptual framework for understanding how the body works both as and with poetic text. Students are invited to bring their creative practices into the classroom, to discover how their own thinking might mesh with these understandings of how body-awareness operates in contemporary experience, of how texture and rhythm can make meaning happen. How might addressing the body help shape our understandings of race, gender, indigeneity, (dis)ability, class and other significant fabrics of intersubjectivity and community? While students can expect to encounter writing and art that can sometimes seem challenging and daunting, this seminar is designed as a hands-on, participatory introduction to contemporary representations of the body, and provides students with an opportunity to begin to evolve their own theoretically informed critical and creative practices.

Term 1

R, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Reimagining Jane Eyre and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Why is Jane Eyre one of the most popular English novels ever written, inspiring successive generations of authors and artists of every description? How did Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland become a culture-text, a text that occupies such a prominent place in the popular imagination that it is collectively known and “remembered” even when the original work has never been read?

We will attempt to answer these and other questions of cultural production in our discussions of the novels and some of their adaptations and reimaginings. We will also explore the ideological assumptions – with respect to gender, race, class, sexuality, mental and physical ability, the environment, ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, etc. – implicit in the original works and in their reimaginings, and in our (and the Victorians’) readings of them.

Our discussions will be wide-ranging: from Jean Rhys’s famous Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea to Paula Rego’s lithographs, Sujata Bhatt’s Rego poems, Cathy Marston and Errollyn Wallen’s dance film Bertha, and Patricia Park’s Re Jane (described by Park as “updating Jane Eyre to contemporary New York and the world of organic produce and identity politics”); from Walt Disney’s 1951 Alice in Wonderland, which continues to define Carroll’s novel in the popular imagination, to Salvador Dalí’s art edition, Tara Bryan’s tunnel book Down the Rabbit Hole, Elizabeth LaPensée and K.C. Oster’s graphic novel Rabbit Chase, and the “Alice industry.”

We will be discussing Jane Eyre in its entirety during our second (September 12th) class. Please begin reading before our course begins.

Our reading and viewing list will include: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World's Classics); Jane Eyre, devised by the Company and directed by Sally Cookson, 2015 (Drama Online, UBC Library); Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Penguin); Bertha, choreographed by Cathy Marston, music by Errollyn Wallen, 2021 (Joffrey Ballet); Patricia Park, Re Jane (Penguin); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview); Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney, 1951 (UBC Library); Alice in Wonderland, directed by Jonathan Miller, 1966 (Library Online Course Reserves, Canvas (only available during term)); Elizabeth LaPensée and K.C. Oster, Rabbit Chase (Annick Press).

Term 2
T, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Modes of Indigenous Cultural and Political Resurgence 

This course will think through crucial questions about Indigenous communities and their relations (or lack thereof) to state structures in what is currently a Canadian and U.S. context, and how these Western political formations come into conflict/contention with Indigenous articulations of belonging, self-determination, gender, cultural expression and production, among many other things. We will examine some of the diverse ways in which creative and critical Indigenous theory texts and other modes of cultural production can facilitate meaning and knowledge about contemporary Indigenous community articulations. This will foster an understanding of how Indigenous studies conceptualizes and addresses the diversity of Indigenous political, historical, and cultural identity formations, and how these interact with the settler state. We will address Indigenous notions of gender and sexuality, kinship, social organization, and resurgence and the way these notions interface with states currently situated on Turtle Island.

Term 2

F, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

The Marvellous Medieval Romance

Medieval romance (OF: romanz) was one of the most popular of medieval genres. First appearing in the twelfth century as the predominant mode of literary entertainment of the aristocratic courts of Western Europe, romance narratives dominated European literature for much of the Middle Ages. Early romances took as their theme the lives, battles, and loves of chivalric knights and ladies, but the romance genre was – over time – appropriated for purposes as diverse as religious instruction, national and global identity politics, and eventually parody and humour.

The course will examine the romances of medieval England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in what has been termed the great flowering of late medieval romance. During this period the genre became highly popular not only with the nobility, but also with the rising mercantile and gentry classes of England, and this changing audience – and the changing expectations that they brought with them – led to a literature marvellously diverse in both form and content. We shall be reading of knights and ladies, giants and dragons, incestuous fathers and wicked usurpers, fearsome Saracens, malicious Faeries, children of the devil, lepers who bathe in baths of blood, and –of course– sex and sword-play. All in all, a bit like A Game of Thrones but with more difficult grammar.

Term 2
Wednesday, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Crip Rhetorics: A Seminar on Disability, Rhetoric, & Activism

Term 2

W, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Great Filters

The Great Filter, a term coined by Robin Hanson in 1998, is a way of explaining why there’s no evidence of extra-terrestrial civilizations. The idea is that in the course of evolution some obstacle arises that constrains (or even destroys) life before it develops the capacity for sustained interstellar communication or travel. If that filter lies in our past—for example, in the difficulty of developing brains capable of abstract reasoning—then humans might be extremely rare and lucky lifeforms who are on the verge of exploring a vast (but possibly unpopulated) universe. But if the Great Filter still lies ahead, then humanity might be on the verge of an existential crisis.

As mainstays of speculative fiction, Great Filters offer writers opportunities to examine present-day concerns. In this course we will read novels that use the idea of the Great Filter to comment on the priorities—and anxieties—of modern life. Some of these depict familiar apocalyptic scenarios: Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker takes place in the distant future after nuclear war devastates England, Greg Bear’s Blood Music chronicles the emergence of artificial intelligence from nanotechnology, and Catherynne M. Valente’s The Past is Red offers a deeply personal and heartbreaking representation of loneliness and hope in a post-climate-change civilization living on the Pacific Garbage Patch. Other novels are more whimsical. In Happiness, Will Ferguson imagines a very funny, world-ending contagion of self-help culture, while Jon Bois’ multimedia 17776 (What Football Will Look Like in the Future) imagines a world where the elimination of reproduction, aging, and death have resulted in a civilization devoted almost entirely to sports.

Note: The reading list for this class is still under consideration, and we may add one or two titles—and modes of destruction—to the above list. A full list will be available later this summer.

Term 1
THURSDAY, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Required of all graduate students in the M.A. program. Pass/Fail.

This course will introduce new MA students in the Department of English Language and Literatures to graduate-level research skills and professional practices. Meetings will include a variety of guest presentations, workshops, and library visits. Sessions will focus on such topics as archival research, digital tools, applying for grants, writing seminar papers and conference proposals, and submitting articles for publications.

Term 1
THURSDAY, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Required of all graduate students in the PhD program. Pass/Fail.

Book History through the Collector’s Eye

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

Recently, UBC Library’s department of Rare Books and Special Collections received a magnificent donation from a retired member of the English department, Professor Patricia Merivale, whose family had collected books for several generations. The collection, which begins in the first era of print and extends into the 20th century, is eclectic, but there are some themes that emerge, such as interest in fine bindings; in relatively obscure religious texts; in canonical literature; and in books that are just, well, valuable. This course will use the Merivale collection as the focus for a survey of the history of the book in the west. We will meet every week in RBSC for hands-on experience with selections from the Merivale collection, alongside relevant items from other parts of our collections. We will also think about what it means for a book to become part of a collection, considering how books move through the world; what motivates collectors; and how institutions reframe collections. Participants will have the opportunity to conduct original research on objects from the Merivale collection, which has never been the subject of sustained research before, and will produce public-facing work to present items from the collection to a general audience.

Digital Methods for Literary Study: Recovering Early Chinese Canadian Literature and History

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

This course is a course in Digital Humanities intended to develop students’ archival and digital research methods, which uses Early Chinese Canadian literature and history as a case study. We will pay particular attention to the lives and works of three early Chinese North American authors:

1) Edith Eaton (1865-1914), who, writing as “Sui Sin Far,” penned sympathetic fictional and journalistic portraits of diasporic Chinese in Montreal and cities in the eastern and western US during the Yellow Peril era. The author of Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), Eaton is credited with founding Asian North American literature. We will read scores of uncollected unsigned 1890s journalism by her about Montreal’s Chinatown, as well as autobiographical works about herself and her family;
2) Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve (1875-1954), Edith’s younger sister, who published bestselling novels set in Japan while assuming an offensive masquerade as Yokohama-born Japanese noblewoman “Onoto Watanna,” before abandoning this persona to lead Universal Studio’s screenwriting department, champion Canadian literature as President of Calgary’s branch of the Canadian Authors’ Association, found Alberta’s Little Theatre movement, and write moving realist fiction and journalism about life on the Canadian prairie. We will read her bestseller The Japanese Nightingale (1901), her realist novel Cattle (1923), some autobiographical works, her journalism about Hollywood, and the screenplay for one of her films; and
3) the Eaton sister’s Chinese-born mother Achuen “Grace” Amoy Eaton, acrobat, translator, missionary, and author of a newly recovered autobiographical serialized 1906 novella, Jade.

Readings will include:
• selections from Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism, and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton and other uncollected journalism by Edith Eaton
• Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna’s A Japanese Nightingale
• Winnifred Eaton’s Cattle
• Screenplay by Winnifred Eaton
• Grace Eaton’s Jade
• Jessica Marie Johnson, "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies,” Social Text 137 vol. 36, no. 4 (December 2018): 57-80.
• Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
• Amy Earhart, “What’s In and What’s Out? Digital Canon Cautions”. In Traces of the Old, Uses of the New.
• Selections from Lily Cho, Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens.
• Selections from Nancy Rao, Chinatown Opera Theater in North America
Most classes will be a mix of discussion and hands-on digital research and writing, with support from cross-faculty digital initiatives and faculty in other disciplines who are leading adjacent DH projects.

Drawing on digitized newspapers, Head Tax records, and other digital and non-digital sources, students will build three projects using digital tools to share research about People, Places, and Texts:
1) A collectively researched but individually authored WordPress blog post with illustrations about a member of Montreal’s nascent Chinese community mentioned in Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far’s 1890s journalism + a CollectionBuilder digital archive of sources used in blog
2) a collectively built spreadsheet of venues and dates for the European tour of a 19th -century Chinese acrobatic troupe that included Eaton’s mother + a collectively built Storymap of that itinerary
3) a TEI-encoded digital edition of a 1920s screenplay by Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve + a 1000-word context essay + a 100-word peer-reviewed headnote, all of which may be featured on winnifredeatonarchive.org

Jewish Guilt

Term 2
FRIDAY, 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM

The well-worn phrase “Jewish guilt” has at least two meanings. It refers, on the one hand, to a style of self-abnegation and anxiety stereotypical of North American (Ashkenazi) Jewish culture. On the other, it denotes an array of historical anti-Jewish beliefs, including the destructive myths that Jews killed Christ, use Christian blood in their rituals, and/or were responsible for the Great Depression and other societal calamities. This wide-ranging course on literary Jews and Jewishness takes inspiration from this disturbing polysemy to investigate how Jewishness intersects with concepts of responsibility and transgression in a variety of literary forms. The course has three units, all linked by this strange thematic thread: a) the ancient destruction of Jerusalem in the medieval imagination; b) thebelle juive (Jewish beauty) and European colonialism; c) eroticism and survivorship in AIDS literature. (Note that the course engages broadly with diasporic Jewish cultures and literatures and avoids a reductive association of Judaism with the Holocaust and Zionism.) Possible primary readings include Josephus’s The Jewish Wars in medieval Latin, Ge’ez, and Hebrew reimaginings; David Reubeni, Diary of a Black Jewish Messiah; Ladino, Arabic, and Yiddish poetry; documents from the Baghdadi Jewish diaspora; short fiction by Jamaica Kincaid, Blume Lempel, Vitalis Danon, and Clarice Lispector; and novels by Sarah Schulman and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. All readings will be in English. The final assignment is a conference paper, which students will be able to submit to a graduate or other academic conference.

Indigenous Land Privatization and Literary Response

Term 1
WEDNESDAY, 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM

Settler colonial violence against Indigenous peoples takes place on many levels, most notoriously through overt slaughter and physical dispossession and relocation. One of the most common but least familiar to the general public, however, is through more bureaucratic and more ostensibly peaceful means, especially privatization mechanisms by which collective land holdings are broken into individual, fee simple landholdings that are more readily lost to coercive sale, tax seizure, eminent domain initiatives, and adverse possession (squatters’ rights) claims. This course will consider Indigenous land privatization not simply as policy but as focus of Indigenous literary response and theoretical concern. Primary readings may include writers such as William Apess, Lee Maracle, Maria Campbell, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Charles Red Corn, Andrea L. Rogers, and LeAnne Howe, with secondary works ranging across literary, historical, economic, and geographic concerns. The course will culminate in a public mini-conference organized by seminar participants.

Term 1
MONDAY, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Transfeminist Rhetorics

In an era replete with rising transantagonism among feminists, raging wildfires sparked by gender reveal parties, and increasing support for state/provincial/federal legislation that upholds a dymorphic model of sex/gender, it hardly seems like we have reached the “transgender tipping point” as proclaimed by the New York Times in 2014. Certainly, there is more trans representation in media than ever before: more trans characters, plot lines, actors, directors, producers, musicians, politicians, and social media influencers. Yet trans violence is also at an all time high: more TERFs, more fire, and more legislation, not to mention more homicides, more domestic violence, and more suicide. So if we really have reached a “tipping point,” is it really a point we want to have tipped?

This course introduces students to the field of Transfeminist Theory from a rhetorical angle, focusing on issues of legibility and security in light of the seemingly paradoxical situation within which many trans people now find themselves—one of heightened visibility but also heightened vulnerability. We will prioritize engaging works by and about disabled, Black, Indigenous, and other racialized trans and gender nonconforming people. We will also emphasize connections between our weekly readings and current events as they unfold in real (or recent) time. Assignments will include weekly reflections on the assigned readings, a short presentation, and a formal seminar paper. Readings will include canonical, controversial, and contemporary scholarship in transgender studies, offering students an overview of the field’s development from the 1960s to the present.

Theories of Rhetoric & Violence: A Worldly Survey

Term 2
TUESDAY, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

This course surveys rhetorical theories from across time and space that address and conceptualize the role of violence and coercion aimed at persuasion, influence, motivation, and faith. With a focus on the promotion and advocacy of violence, nonetheless some of the readings seek the avoidance of violence through both overt suppression and exploiting the paradoxes and antitheses that arise from thinking about war and peace (e.g. aggression and self-defense, order and chaos, etc). Course readings might include some combination of Guiguzi, Mozi, selections from “the seven Chinese military classics,” the Wen Tzu, The Gateless Gate, Daikaku’s Samurai Zen, the late shogunate samurai Yamaga Soko, Sutra of Golden Light, the 20th century propaganda theories of Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Mohamed Siad Barre, Kwame Nkrumah, Mao Tse Tung, and – in order to consider the complete suppression of violence, dissent, and activism - Kim Jong Il’s On Juche Literature.

Othello and its Afterlives

Term 1
TUESDAY, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

In “Letting Go of Othello,” Fred Moten writes, “Othello is an experiment in black personhood for which black persons are not responsible.” Moten’s analysis of what is arguably Shakespeare’s most famous “race play” speaks to contemporary concerns about the representation of Black people by non-Black artists, draws attention to the fact that Othello stages a white playwright’s fantasy of a Black hero, and suggests that Othello has created a certain burden for Black people. Drawing heavily from the work of Moten and other Black Studies scholars (such as bell hooks, Sylvia Wynter, Cedric Robinson, Christina Sharpe, and Sharon Patricia Holland), this seminar will delve deeply into Shakespeare’s Othello and its afterlives. We will consider early modern English constructions of race (both blackness and whiteness), especially as it intersects with religion, gender, sexuality, and social rank. We will then examine afterlives of the play, how later engagements with Othello (performances, visual culture, literary criticism, and adaptations) respond to, revise, reject, and/or redeploy the play’s configurations of race and power: Romantic responses to the play (Samuel Coleridge’s is infamous!), artistic representations of scenes from the play, the history of blackface performance, landmark performances by Black actors (Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson), Ishamel Reed’s Japanese by Spring, Carlyle Phillips’s The Nature of Blood, Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Rita Dove’s Sonata Mullatica, Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet, Stew’s Passing Strange, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Course assignments: 4 short response papers, a presentation, and a 6000-word seminar paper.

Exploring Jane Austen: Reading race, empire, settlement, and migration

Term 1
WEDNESDAY, 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM

In January 2023, Kerry Sinanan and Marian Wassif issued a call for papers to be included in a volume they are editing on Jane Austen and whiteness for SUNY Press’s Long Nineteenth Century Series. Here is the volume’s mandate as the editors describe it: “The volume will show that it is specifically the making of Regency white people that has granted Austen her global, iconic status today.” Sinanan and Wassif are responding to several features of Austen criticism and Austen’s career: not only the recent online fandom of overt white supremacists who hold Austen’s protagonists up as examples of pure white “trad wife” womanhood but also recent contrasting work by Patricia Matthew and Devoney Looser arguing, respectively, that Austen’s novels reflect the vexed complexities of a Europe dependent on Atlantic chattel slavery and on goods and wealth produced by enslaved people and that Austen belonged to an overtly abolitionist family, whose politics must have inflected her novels; the classic statement by Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1992) that Austen’s work everywhere reveals Britain’s dependency on empire but failed to recognize or critique what it reveals; and Said’s major influence Raymond Williams, who remarked in The Country and the City (1973) that Austen did not merely turn her face away from enslavement and empire but “chose to ignore [all] the decisive historical events of her time.” This seminar will follow Matthew’s call for an approach to Austen that recognizes that “there are no literary moments or figures whose work is not responding to questions of liberation” while making room for consideration of the many ways such work might have responded and might have been understood as responding. The purpose of this seminar is therefore to allow its participants ample space, in a detailed investigation of the six finished novels plus the unfinished Sanditon, to consider such questions of liberation and the early nineteenth-century histories of race, empire, settlement, and migration from which they arise and to which they respond. In addition to Austen’s novels, readings will include criticism and theory by writers including Williams, Said, Fredric Jameson, Clifford Siskin, William Galperin, Edward Gikandi, Lisa Lowe, Emily Rohrbach, Mary Favret, Christina Sharpe, Orrin Wang, and Patricia Matthew, material drawn from Austen’s popular reception and canonization as discussed, in particular, by Janine Barchas and as represented in current online cultures, and contemporary writings on the histories of power and mobility in the Atlantic world of the early nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-Century Minds and Machines

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

The modern discipline of psychology developed during the nineteenth-century alongside new materialist understandings of the mind. In this seminar, we will consider how ideas on “the physical basis” of mind entered into the fiction of the period (and also how that fiction helped shape theories in the broader culture). Much like current worries about AI and chatbots generating writing and art, the specter of machines capable of thinking and even of producing creative works gave rise to anxieties and speculation in the Victorian period. The distinction between minds and machines was increasingly questioned. Was the mind a machine? Could machines become minds? New technologies of communication and recording also influenced conceptions of mind and literary representations of consciousness.

We will read fictions of virtual reality, of the technological transmission of thought, of mind swapping, and of machines that develop consciousness. But we will also look at less overt treatments of the relations between minds, bodies, and mechanisms in some realist fiction of the period. Topics discussed will include nineteenth-century depictions of intelligent machines; early attempts at artificial intelligence; emerging technologies and consciousness; theories of the unconscious, “aberrant” minds, gendered minds, scientific racism, and automata—both mechanical and human.

Readings will include:

• Ambrose Bierce “Moxon’s Master”
• Samuel Butler, “Book of the Machines”
• Charles Dickens, “The Signal Man”
• George Eliot, “Shadows of the Coming Race”
• Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders
• Rudyard Kipling, “Wireless”
• Ada Lovelace, “Notes on the Analytical Engine”
• Israel Zangwill, “The Memory Clearing House”
• short fiction by Grant Allen, Edward Bellamy, Arthur Conan Doyle, Florence McLandburgh, H. G. Wells, and others

        From:

• Long Bui, Model Machines: A History of the Asian as Automaton
• Louis Onuorah Chude-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics
• Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production
• Sally Shuttleworth and Jenny Bourne Taylor, Embodied Selves
• Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, ed., Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time, and Intelligence

Assignments and Other Requirements:

• Seminar paper (roughly 20 pages)
• Presentation (roughly 25 minutes)
• Three sets of informal questions/comments on the readings

Forms of Coexistence

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

What is a people? What is a nation? How does a people connect to "a" land? What comprises self-determination? In the first half of the twentieth century, nationalist conflict was rife, political borders were hardening and closing, refugees were everywhere, and human coexistence once again received global attention as an urgent concern. Some speculated that the world could or should become cosmopolitan, whether morally (taking on a commitment to mutual aid) or politically (to adopt some form of cooperation between nations, rather than devoting one’s powers to competition), while others took up the banner of the modern nation state as protection against the many problems of human coexistence.

This course proposes a nuanced and sensitive review of concepts, issues, and topics of human coexistence (with itself, and with the planet) formally at the level of theory (Fanon, Baldwin, Said, Levinas, Colebrook, Braidotti, Derrida, Laclau and Mouffe, et al.), as well as to explore its literary appearance as a problem in texts of modern life such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Woolf’s Between the Acts, E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and Barnes’s Nightwood. Topics include alternative structures and methods for creatively articulating political interests, justice and rights discourse, thin and thick conceptions of international or world government, layered sovereignties, conflict resolution and reconciliation strategies, and the planet-wide imbrication of justicial, political, cultural, and economic formations and practices.

The Cold War in Asia: Asian American and Asian Canadian Responses

Term 2
FRIDAY, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM

The period post-WWII until the 1980s is conventionally understood in the West as the Cold War. Marked by events such as the Cuban missile crisis, the war in Vietnam, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, these years are remembered as a tense time when it seemed that the conflict between communist and capalist democratic ideologies might result in the outbreak of nuclear war. At the same time, it is important to remember that these same tensions played out very differently in Asia and took the form of multiple bloody and violent wars.  This course will return to this historical period in order to rethink what is conventionally remembered in the West as a conflict between the US and the USSR as a struggle that also involved—and, indeed, was staged in—Asia.

We will explore the legacies of Cold War logics and the afterlife of the wars in Asia for Canadians and Americans by engaging with works of literature and theory. How do these contradictory memories and competing historical narratives shape how Asian diasporas in North America imagine themselves and are understood by non-Asians? How does what critic Jodi Kim calls the “protracted afterlife” of the Cold War continue to influence current conversations about migration, citizenship, and global events and politics? We will contextualize our discussions of these literary texts with critical and theoretical material and documentary films in order to think critically about these competing cultural representations and the narratives they produce.

Contemporary U.S. Novel: DeLillo, Morrison, Lee

Term 1
THURSDAY, 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

This seminar will examine in depth works from the 1970s to the 2010s by three of the great U.S. novelists: Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, and Chang-rae Lee. Readings will include most or all of the following texts: DeLillo’s Americana (1971), The Names (1982), and Libra (1988); Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz (1993), and Paradise (1997); and Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), A Gesture Life (1999), and On Such a Full Sea (2014).

Our goal will in part be to understand 40 to 50 years of literary and cultural history through figures who, in their monumental power and reach, tend to embody certain periodizing and otherwise explanatory categories but also trouble their boundaries and distinctions, whether those categories be (to name only a few) modernism, postmodernism, paranoia, twentieth-century African American novels, contemporary U.S. literature, historical fiction, transnational U.S. fiction, or immigrant writing. We will also be on the lookout for hidden symmetries and unexpected lines of influence.

The focus will be on close examination of the novels and on two major writing assignments by each student: a seminar paper of about five pages that will form the basis of discussion in most weeks; and a final research paper at the end of term. Students will also lead discussion in selected weeks and write discussion posts. Essays from each novelist will be part of our reading, and criticism on the syllabus, invoking a wide range of theoretical paradigms, will come from Colleen Lye, David Cowart, John McClure, Mark McGurl, Chris Lee, Lavinia Delois Jennings, Kenneth Warren, John K. Young, Amy Hungerford, and others.

Canadian Literature and the 2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize

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

When the Scotiabank Giller Prize was created in 1994, the award’s founder decided that “cultural, political, and regional factors would be wilfully shunned.” The “only criterion was to pick the best book.”  What, however, is the “best”? This is a question that has long plagued literary studies, alongside the problematic concept of ‘great books.’  The fraught answer relies on aesthetic evaluation, critical taste and expectation, and subjective notions of literary value. It also changes over time and across space. And, why “shun” cultural, political and regional factors? What is lost? What is gained?

In this seminar, the 2024 Scotiabank Giller Prize will serve as a case study for the critical examination of both literary prize culture and contemporary literary history in Canada. Together, we will study the works of fiction shortlisted for the 2024 Prize and situate the work in the larger context of the heated cultural debates of the past decade. Both writers and critics in the Canadian literary community have been occupied with discussions of the asymmetrical distribution of power in the literary establishment, asked whose voices are heard, questioned what kinds of books are lauded, queried who has access to publication and subsequent reviews, and considered those who have refused to accept the status quo.  The ongoing discussions about inclusion and exclusion have been situated within significant critical conversations about settler colonialism, critical race studies, and generic expectation in the study of Canadian literature. In this class, we will examine the relationship between these critical conversations and the most lucrative prize in Canadian letters. We will ask: what influence do literary prizes have in developing audience taste? What are the benefits of prizes for authors and the literary community? Sales of shortlisted books increase by approximately 500%  (“The Giller Effect”). What does such material support and exposure mean for writers? What about the issues raised by increased corporate sponsorship in a time of waning government support of the arts?  So many questions! We will consider the ongoing debates as we critically assess the culture and politics of awards systems in Canada. In this class, in addition to studying the shortlisted books for 2024, we will read critical and theoretical works by Lorraine York, Gillian Roberts, James English, Erin Wunker, Julie Rak, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Joshua Whitehead, Kai Cheng Thom, Sarah Brouillette, Pierre Bourdieu, and Walter Benjamin, among others.

We will also have the opportunity to look behind-the-scenes at the Scotiabank Giller Prize for 2024 and meet with some of the shortlisted authors, jury members, and publishers. While much of the reading list for this class won’t be available until the 2024 shortlist is announced, books by MG. Vassanji, Esi Edugyan, Alice Munro, Vincent Lam, Omar El Akkad, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Madeleine Thien, Michael Ondaatje, André Alexis, Margaret Atwood, Rohinton Mistry, Suzette Mayr, Ian Williams, and Sarah Bernstein have all won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in the past and students will be asked to research a prize-winning book from this list in addition to the 2024 list in the context of class discussions.

Fictions of London

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

“Neither of us are English, we’re Londoners you see”
--Sammy, in Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid

This course will attempt to chart the urban and fictional landscape of the former imperial metropolis and conceptualize a London uneasily situated at the intersection of the material and the imaginary. We will read, watch, and listen to a selection of novels, poetry, films, photographs and recordings from the mid-1950s to the present, and attempt to address such issues as the representation of space in former imperial, now global, centers, and the processes of change (cultural, social, political, aesthetic) that such representations both respond to and produce. We will debate the extent to which these fictions of London are intimately bound up not only with migrant and diasporic, colonial and postcolonial identities, but also with increasing, and in some instances highly troubled, political and cultural ties to Europe and America. Our aim will be to consider London as a complex and conflicted space of intercultural exchange where social and material inequalities are constantly challenged and resisted in imaginative representations within both literary and popular cultural forms.

Our primary texts might include works by Sam Selvon, Colin MacInnes, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Derek Jarman, Hanif Kureishi, Patrick Keiller, Gilbert & George, Monica Ali, and Zadie Smith. Secondary readings might include writings by Iain Sinclair, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Stuart Hall, John McLeod, Edward Soja, and others.

Bodies: Person, Flesh, Thing

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

The basic premise of the course is that bodies are natural and social, biological and cultural. We have our bodies and we are our bodies. Bodies are both voluntary and involuntary. Our current understanding that the boundaries of one’s self are coextensive with the boundaries of one’s body had its origins in the eighteenth century. Using a broadly historical approach, we will begin with Richardson’s epistolary narrative Pamela and John Cleland’s 1747 pornographic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure to consider bodily privacy and its invasions. From there, we will move on to slavery, judicial torture, and incarceration as systems that reduce persons to things and flesh. Readings: Mary Prince’s slave narrative The History of Mary Prince; Jean Amery’s memoir At the Mind’s Limits; James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk; Susan Brison’s Aftermath; Andrea Long Chu’s Females; and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Finally, to develop the idea that bodies are subject not only to intentional harm, but also to involuntary forces such as sickness or impairment, the class will end with A Body, Undone, Cristina Crosby’s memoir of her disability. Critical and theoretical excerpts will be drawn from the work of Michael Foucault, Hortense Spillers, Didier Fassin, Elizabeth Hinton, and Jay Bernstein. Requirements: regular attendance and participation; Canvas posts; a 5-page book review; and a 15-page research essay.

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

The course description for this section of ENGL 553-002 is not yet available. Please check again shortly.

Term 2
THURSDAY, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

The course description for this section of ENGL 553-003 is not yet available. Please check again shortly.

Photo-textualities: Writing in the Age of the Camera

Term 2
THURSDAY, 1:30 PM - 4:30 pM

“The most obvious thing about words and pictures is that they routinely appear together, and even the simplest joint appearances—words supplying credit lines or captions, pictures supplying illustrations—suggest how each art works, how the shown is never exactly the same as the spoken.” (Jefferson Hunter, from Image and the Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photographs and Texts)

This course will examine the influence of photography and cinema on literary form. Photography has become such a common aspect of contemporary life that camera technology is now regularly built into smart phones, tablets, desktop and laptop computers, and automobiles. The photographic recording of everyday life provides an unprecedented archive of visual memories. Photographic ways of seeing exert complex and contradictory effects on life: the camera both records and distorts, and it is a tool for both those who expose social injustice and those who seek to invade the privacy of the citizen and to place others under the power of surveillance. Susan Sontag, in On Photography, alerts us to the “peremptory rights [of the photographer] to interfere with, to invade, or ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions” (11). The judgments of the invasive camera eye have, as Sontag states, shaped subjective assessment: "We learn to see ourselves photographically: to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely to judge that one would look good in a photograph” (85).

We will explore some of the following central questions: Given the increasing power of photographs and cinematography in the formation of private and public judgments, how have novelists, poets, dramatists, and film makers responded to these visual influences? What happens to the articulation of the written self when it confronts the power of photography? What kinds of critical strategies have writers adopted to resist the invasive influences of photography and visual culture? How have writers incorporated some of the techniques of photographic and cinematic ways of seeing into their forms of writing?

We will think carefully about the dynamic relationships between literary texts and the modes of visualization peculiar to photography and cinema. We will review the pre-history of literary representations of photography through the rhetorical concept of ekphrasis, or the representation of painting or sculpture in literary forms, and the historic impact of such developments as the daguerreotype, portable personal cameras, motion picture photography, and videography. We will also consider uses of photography as an instrument of colonial control, through passports and immigration documents such as the Chinese Canadian Head Tax, and the effects of what Lily Cho has deemed “Mass Capture,” and through the mass scales of visual surveillance theorized by John Tagg.

Readings will include Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, essays by Walter Benjamin, and selections from Susan Sontag's On Photography, Kyo Maclear's Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki, and the Art of Witness, John Tagg’s The Disciplinary Frame, and Lily Cho’s Mass Capture: Chinese Canadian Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens. We will also consider works of fiction, drama, poetry, and cinema that respond to our increasingly visual culture such as Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, Le Thi Diem Thuy's The Gangster We are All Looking For, Marie Clement's The Edward Curtis Project, Roy Miki's Mannequin Rising, and films by Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window), Michaelangelo Antonioni, (Blow-up), and Christopher Nolan (Memento).

Each seminar meeting will usually include both the discussion of an assigned literary work and a theoretical or critical essay.

Course requirements:

1) Weekly participation in the discussion of readings, topics, and questions: 15%

2) One oral presentation (15 minutes) on a primary text and critical context: 10%

3) One short critical meditation on a core concept situated in theories of photography and literature: 15%

4) One final essay (3500-4000 words, or 14-16 pages, excluding bibliography), that could emerge from a revised version of your seminar presentation, or which pursues your particular research interests on a relevant question: 60%

Decolonizing Technoscience

Term 1
TUESDAY, 3:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Structural relations between colonial power and scientific knowledge production have shaped political and cultural life since the nineteenth century. Objectivity, facts, experiment, and the scientific method gained global authority and political power at a time when European powers dominated much of the non-western world. Even as decolonization, anti-imperial movements, and neoliberalism variously shifted global political relations over the next two centuries, scientific objectivity was often believed to be neutral, and held up as aspirational for developing nations. Today, activist and scholarly calls to decolonize knowledge force us to critique and rethink the relationship between technoscientific practice and political power. Histories of empire, decolonization, and development have come into conversation with the history, philosophy, and anthropology of science and technology. This course offers a graduate-level introduction to these conversations, via writing in colonial history, development studies, informatics, feminist science studies, and science fiction. Through widely interdisciplinary reading, we will seek to understand the significance of the “decolonizing turn” in technical practice and scientific knowledge production. Students from all disciplinary backgrounds are welcome to bring a critical, open, engaged perspective. Readings include Marx, Foucault, Kuhn, Haraway, Virginia Eubanks, Safiya Noble, Lorraine Daston, and more.

Early Modern Energies

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

This seminar will be coordinated with a research project called “Energy Transitions in Long Modernity” (https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FY007166%2F1). In our seminar, we shall survey the broad field of the Energy Humanities before narrowing focus on histories and representations of energy sources in the long seventeenth century. Research nodes will include the early modern history of renewables (sun, wind, water) and technologies associated with capturing them; the uneven transition from wood to coal, as well as the use of peat; and, the extraction of labor from a range of bodies, including animals, servants, and enslaved persons. We’ll read scholarly texts from across the disciplines (History, Comparative Literary Studies, Art History) and host a series of guest speakers representing them. Our literary texts will include mainstays in the utopian tradition (Thomas More, William Shakespeare, Francia Bacon, and Francis Godwin) and fictional and literary accounts of global empire (Theodore de Bry, Richard Hakluyt, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift). Each student will lead an hour of seminar, submit weekly responses, and complete a final writing assignment.

A. Medieval and Renaissance literatures: ENGL 343 to ENGL 350

B. 18th- and 19th-century literatures: ENGL 351 to ENGL 364

C. Modern, contemporary, transnational, and Indigenous literatures: ENGL 365 to ENGL 379

D. Media, theory, genre, and special topic:  ENGL 332 to ENGL 339; ENGL 380 to ENGL 397

A. Structure of English: ENGL 330, 331, 321

B. History of English: ENGL 318, 319, 342, 343, 344, 346

C. Approaches to contemporary English: ENGL 323, 324, 328

D. Discourse and meaning: ENGL 312, 322, 327

E. Rhetoric: ENGL 307-311

Note: topics covered in any of the above groups may also focus on ENGL 326 (which has no permanent title) and ENGL 489 (majors seminar-language, where the instructor decides on the topic offered in any given year).

Each course will be classed into one of the groups A-E in any given year, depending on the topic covered. Please see an advisor if you want ENGL 326 or ENGL 489 to count as satisfying group A-E requirements.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri  9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

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.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   10:00 AM- 11:00 AM

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.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

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.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

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.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri 1:00 PM- 2:00 PM

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”

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   2:00 PM- 3:00 PM

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 ENGL 100 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.

Term 1
Tue Thu  9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

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.

Term 1
Tue Thu   11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

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.

Term 1
Tue Thu   12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

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.

Term 1
Tue Thu   2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

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).

Term 1
Tue Thu   3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 2, Mon Wed Fri   9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

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.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

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.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM- 1:00 PM

Identity and Belonging

How do we discover who we are and where we belong? How much of who we are is determined by where we come from, who we surround ourselves with, and what we do? What are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves? These are some of the questions that the selected authors in this course ask us to contemplate.

In this course, we will explore what it means to belong in a variety of contexts within modern North-American society, focusing on the ways that some communities (such as Indigenous, immigrant, and queer communities) experience marginalization and come to reconfigure their own sense of belonging.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   1:00 PM- 2:00 PM

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

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

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.

Term 2
Tue Thu  9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

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”

Term 2
Tue Thu  11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Writing Trans Resistance

Term 2
Tue Thu   12:30 PM- 2:00 PM

On First Reading

This course is an adventure. I have placed on the syllabus a novel, plays, poems, and scholarship that I have never read before. It is my presumption that we will all be reading these texts for the first time. These will be our questions: What do we need to know (in advance) in order to read a text? Do we need biography, history, theory, and scholarship to frame our encounter with these texts? With what feelings do we encounter a text for the first time? And how do we turn our feelings into literary analysis?

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

Term 2
Tue Thu  2:00 PM- 3:30 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

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.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri 3:00 PM- 4:00 PM

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”

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

400 Years of Asking the Big Questions

There will be shipwrecks, magic, mad scientists, beast-people, a garden party, and his first ball. As we read stories of wrecks and disasters—structural, personal, and social— we will consider the significance of the ways these stories ask some of the big questions human beings have struggled with for centuries: What makes us human and not animal? What is human nature, and is it really natural? What about gender, race, and other kinds of difference? Who has power and why? Do we just reflect reality with the stories we tell ourselves, or are we actually creating reality? Along with substantial work on poetry, this section of English 110 will focus on one play, one novel, and a group of short stories that engage the different ways that people respond to circumstances that challenge what they thought was “natural” or “universal.” This course introduces students to the analytical skills and critical thinking essential to university-level literary reading, thinking and writing. In large lectures and 30-student Friday discussion groups, students pursue hands-on practice of methods of literary analysis.

Please note that this is not a course on writing (that’s ENGL 100 or WRDS 150): we’ll spend our time on fabulous literature rather than essay-writing technicals.

Want a head start this summer? Choose HG Wells’ short but creepy mad scientist novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau or Shakespeare’s classic shipwreck+magic play, The Tempest. You can see videos of different productions of Tempest for free through the UBC library or stream the great 2010 film, starring Helen Mirren and Djimon Hounsou (but take a pass on the really, really terrible Island of Dr Moreau movie, trust me!).

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Imitation is at the heart of most works of literature. Even as critics and scholars celebrate authors’ originally, the truth is that all writers copy: They make allusions to other works of literature. They embed quotation in their works. They parody other writers and forms for satirical purposes. This particular section of ENGL 110 explores how a diverse range of US writers--poets, fiction writers, even rappers--find their original voices, paradoxically, by imitating earlier writers and genres. Students will explore how allusions--to both Broadway musicals and rap lyrics--inform the meaning of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2016 musical Hamilton. We will also consider how 20th-century African American poets parody Shakespeare and other poets in order to cultivate a distinctly African American poetic tradition. We will analyze how literal and literary inheritance are at the heart of the American novel. Finally, we will reflect on how artificial intelligence chatbots generate content through imitation.

Works will include:

• Hamilton: The Musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda
• Selected poems
• Nella Larsen’s Passing OR Winnifred Eaton Reeve’s Cattle

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

In relation: Identity, Inheritance, Survival, Love

The founding idea of western European and North American settler colonial versions of democracy is the primacy of the person (the self-identical subject, the distinctly human, the autonomous individual.) Yet societies considered globally offer many understandings of actual and ideal relationships between the thinking, feeling one and the gifts, obligations, and lived experience of the many. Even those European and Euro-American philosophers and poets who have longed for and celebrated the singular self-sufficient person have, inevitably, also uneasily acknowledged that people intrinsically and necessarily exist in relation to other people. Drawing on and considering works by Indigenous (Métis), Black (American), Vietnamese American, and Anglo-British authors, from the 19^th century to the present, we’ll focus on four specific and elaborate investigations of identities and persons in relation to others. We’ll consider the way these texts represent relations between identity and community in the context of war, colonization, enslavement, and the rise of western European science. We’ll ask questions such as: what is kinship, and what do these texts propose it could be? How do these texts, and how should we, understand the connections between family and political understandings of community? What does, and what might, community look like in the continuing wake of genocide? How are identities shaped by inheritance—and what does an individual owe to ancestors and to history? How has, and how can, writing, and the writer’s art, critique, repair, and build community? We’ll focus, especially, on considering these ideas in conjunction with our own understandings of identity in relation to family, kinship, community, and society.

Major texts:

• Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (2017);
• Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves (2017);
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987);
• Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

The Body at the Border 

This course introduces students to methods for studying literature, media, and critical theory by focusing on the body’s relationship to borders. Through our engagement with North American cultural productions, students will develop skills essential to university-level reading, writing, and analysis by engaging contemporary North American cultural productions. We will focus on the relationships between race, gender, sexuality and narratives of migration within ongoing histories of imperialism and settler colonialism. The course uses the frameworks of literary theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and diaspora studies in order to attend to formal and thematic components of cultural productions, and to put them in conversation with questions about borders and migration.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

What can Literature do?: Counternarratives of the 21^st Century

Scientists use data—gathered through experimentation, for example, or measurement—to discover and interpret the world around them. What do literary scholars use? What kind of “data” is a graphic narrative, a novel, or a poem? And what can the study of literature tell us about how we interpret the world we live in? In particular, what might we learn from literature that we can’t learn by other means?

The texts on this course include local and global stories written in this century. They will show us contemporary lives lived in different corners of the world—for example, a Pakistani university student in New York, an Indigenous hockey player in Ontario. These are personal stories about public events, and they are the stories that have generally been less discovered, measured, or recorded. They reveal the sometimes invisible, even erased, narratives and lives that lurk behind the headlines or history books. They invite us to ask, who gets to speak and who may be silenced? What kind of knowledge does literature give us access to—and what should we do with that knowledge?

Texts: Possible texts include The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, Injun by Jordan Abel.

Term 1
Tue Thu   11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Fictions of the Queer Past

Us. The word glided through her mind like a leaf, or a stone, troubling the waters. Over the years, she’d encountered a range of women who could be seen as part of this us, whether they’d admit to it or not…but wasn’t joining the trip a kind of incrimination? Five, together. She’d never heard of such a thing. --Carolina de Robertis, Cantoras

Who and what is queer? What counts as queer history and queer historical fiction? Focusing on two recent novels about the queer 20th century (Carolina de Robertis’s Cantoras and Michael Nava’s Carved in Bone), and reading other short fiction and poetry, we will explore these questions and pursue the pleasures of critical reading and writing. By the end of this first-year writing course, students will have developed the tools to succeed in humanities courses.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Defining the Self

How do we define ourselves – as Canadians, as artists, as lovers, as survivors? These are some of the broad issues of identity and belonging we will explore through a selection of fiction, drama and poetry in this section of English 110.  We will consider ways in which individuals craft and perform the "selves" they wish to be, and the multiplicity of ways in which writers convey these identities through literary texts. To what extent do we control the person we become and to what extent are we shaped by our community? How meaningful are the concepts of ethnicity, gender and nationality in the creation of identity? How can a writer convey the complex and shifting nature of individual and group identity through the permanence of written discourse? Texts studied will include a novel (Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi), a play (The Rez Sisters by Tomson Highway), and a selection of short stories and poetry. In lectures and seminars, students will engage with concepts of genre and form in literature and will pursue hands-on practice of methods of literary analysis. Students will be encouraged to develop independent critical responses to the works studied. Assessment will include two in-class essays, a term paper and a final examination.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

The course provides students with an understanding of relationships between literature and media. It further provides them with an understanding of literary genre, and of the ways in which different media function. There are modules on the electronic book, on the relationship between photography and narration, on information culture, on media history, on media metafictions, and on Indigenous media. In addition, the course encourages students in reading and writing strategies that will enhance their ability to communicate ideas effectively.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Literature for a Warming World

“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, address to the United Nations General Assembly, 2019)

When we think about climate change, we may feel torn between concern for the fate of our planet and our desire for an unending supply of consumer goods. Depending on our politics, respect for scientific expertise, and ecological sensibility, we are likely to admire figures like Greta Thunberg or throw our lot in with her critics and plead the necessity of continued economic growth. Wherever our allegiances lie, we may wonder what potential worlds await us. In this course we will read a variety of literary representations of worlds altered by climate change. Readings will include a selection of poems and short stories, a novel (Catherynne M. Valente’s The Past is Red), and a graphic novel (Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s Snowpiercer: The Escape).

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   1:00 PM- 2:00 PM

Fantastic Pasts and Science Futures: Speculative Fictions and Histories

Where have we been, and where are we going? Fantasy and Science Fiction – two of the genres that fit into the capacious mode of Speculative Fiction – have been at the centre of addressing these questions since the middle of the 20^th century.  This course is structured in two parts: first examining the history and development of the genre of Fantasy – from JRR Tolkien to GRR Martin and beyond – and its role in mediating the multiple pasts of western society, and second an introduction to the ever-moving genre of Science Fiction and its probing speculations about our future. We will read a range of novels and short stories – and watch some film and TV – both classics and lesser known works, as we examine the role of these two genres in the exploration of how literature reflects, shapes, and reshapes our sense of our past as a society, and poses questions as to our possible futures.

Please note that this is not a course on writing (that would be ENGL 100 or WRDS 150): we will spend our time on fantastic literature rather than essay-writing technical skills.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Strange Science, Ghosts, Robots, and Literary Theory

In this section of English 110, we will read literary texts depicting ghosts, artificial life, and strange science. The course will teach you to think and write critically about literature at the university level. It will also introduce you to contemporary literary theories. We will examine a range of approaches to the interpretation of literature, including psychoanalytical, Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial, and use the theories to analyze the literature we study.

Texts:

Texts read will include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, George Eliot’s “The Lifted Veil,” and Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots).

Term 2
Tue Thu  9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Modernism, Science, and the Environment

The early twentieth century was a period of rapid technological change, coupled with unprecedented experimentation by artists reflecting on the transformations around them. We will read novels, poems, plays, and short stories from this time period with an eye toward how scientific authority and technological power is imitated, placed on stage, interrogated, and parodied. Themes to include: scientific experimentation and the scientist as cultural figure, representations of race, gender, and sexuality, ideas of heredity and evolution, fears of technology and apocalyptic imaginaries, environmental degradation and foreshadowings of climate change, and the changing relationship to nature, nonhuman life, and historical memory. Readings from Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, George Schuyler, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and others.

Term 2
Tue Thu   11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Literary Monsters and Monstrous Literature

Rey: “You are a monster.”
Kylo Ren: “Yes, I am.”
– Star Wars: The Last Jedi

“Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world” – Richard III 1.i

What is a monster? We know monsters from myths and legends, folktales, horror fiction and film. We know their variety: the grotesque, the beautiful, the terrifying, the pitiable, the sports of nature and the forces of evil. Dragons, werewolves, vampires, zombies, Frankenstein’s Creature, Dorian Gray, the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Marisa Coulter, many of the characters in The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones: they’re everywhere, from under the bed to the house next door to the battlefield, and right into a great deal of literature. Which leaves us here: in this section of 110 we’ll focus on how literary texts across the genres use representations of monstrosity in ways that inspire both terror and horror, as well as (let’s be honest) fascination and even enjoyment.

We’ll look at William Shakespeare’s Richard III (a play that meditates on villainy and ambition in demonizing its subject for Tudor audiences, yet still fascinates contemporary ones) and at Ian McKellen’s 1995 film adaptation, which shifts the setting to an alternate-reality 1930s England where fascism takes hold. We will also consider various stage and screen adaptations as approaches to the play, including recent ones using race and gender-diverse casting, and casting as Richard actors who are themselves physically disabled or disfigured. Other core texts include two novels: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as selected poetry (with a focus on the sonnet form).

Evaluation will be based on two timed essays, a home paper, and a final exam, plus participation in discussion.

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

Term 2
Tue Thu  2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

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

• two in-class essays: 20% each
• home essay (1200 words): 30%
• final exam: 30%

 Provisional Reading List:

poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Michael Ondaatje, Jackie Kay, Hai-Dang Phan, and others (available online)

short fiction by Kate Chopin, Anton Chekhov, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and others (available online)

Shakespeare, King Lear (Broadview) Samuel Beckett, Endgame (Grove)

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Producing Consumable Texts: Exploring Representations of Food and Eating

With the popularity of The Food Network and social media, the pleasures of food have extended to consuming representations of eating and food production (e.g., foraging, harvesting, cooking). This course will explore diverse ways of communicating about food, including through personal essays, restaurant reviews, blog posts, recipes/cookbooks, food shows/documentaries, and Instagram reels. This course will consider each of these genres/media, considering how their forms help convey particular meanings in relation to food. For example, how do recipes instruct readers about a particular lifestyle or ethos tied up with certain kinds of food and preparation? How does a restaurant review provide both critique as well as vicarious enjoyment for the reader? How do visual elements, such as photographs and video, facilitate the consumption experience? The course will also consider how issues related to race, colonialism, gender, and social inequity can be subsumed in the eating process or brought to light through more disruptive eating and communicational practices.

Term 1
Tue Thu   9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Rhetoric and Public Controversy

How does everyday language work to influence our thoughts and actions? This course delves into the realm of rhetoric – the motivation of belief and action, which encompasses not only overt techniques of persuasion and propaganda, but also the quotidian aspects of language and symbol usage that facilitate (or hinder) our daily lives and organize society. Students will analyze the rhetoric of contemporary public controversies, such as the politics of climate change, the public function of science, and whatever current controversies fill the headlines this semester.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri  10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Speaking Truth to Power: Social Representation and Reality

"My perception is as much a fact as the sun." --RW Emerson

How does writing depict reality differently from, say, photographs or speech?

One distinguishing feature of writing is definitiveness.  Writing began as engraving; to write has always meant to 'write down,' to inscribe and fix in an unchanging way, creating heretofore inconceivable notions of permanence, property, and quantitative linear accumulation.  By contrast, voice, like music, comes and goes with each performance; and images are indefinite; 'imagistic' means 'open to interpretation.'

Originally used for accounting, or "book-keeping," writing correlates reality with permanent and precise calculation and recording.  This correlation led not just to new economies but to whole religions "of the book" and to the legal codes upon which ever larger-scale human civilization has developed, eventually even marking its own geologic era, the "Anthropocene,” overlapping with the planet’s “sixth mass extinction event.”

Humanity’s future would seem to hinge less on the technological innovation we tend to celebrate, than on learning to acknowledge and communicate the reality of systemic environmental, racist, and misogynist violence--aka, capitalism, racism and patriarchy. The texts for this class all in various ways “speak truth to power” by writing "against the grain," attempting to acknowledge, in necessarily haunting and strange ways, what writing disregards, especially the voices of children, women, racial minorities, nomads and non-humans, as well as their voluntary allies, self-styled iconoclasts or 'modern barbarians.'

Required Texts (available at UBC bookstore):

Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me
Cheryl Strayed, Wild
William Finnegan, Barbarian Days
Patrik Svensson, The Book of Eels

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   10:00 - 11:00

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?

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   1:00 PM- 2:00 PM

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.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 - 12:00 PM

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.

Terms 1 - 2
Mon Wed Fri   2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

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.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM- 1:00 PM

This course focuses on selected English writers of poetry, drama, and prose from the late 14th to the 18th centuries.  The following literature will be studied: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Shakespeare’s King Lear; selections from John Milton’s Paradise Lost; Part 4 of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels; Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.  Class discussion of each work will sometimes focus on its treatment of social, political, and economic issues of the period in which it was written: for instance, the alleged corruption of the late medieval Church and the questioning of conventional gender roles in the early modern period.

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

Texts:

• Joseph Black et al., eds., The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Concise Edition, Volume A (The Medieval Period, The Renaissance and the Early Seventeenth Century, The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century), Third Edition
• Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (Broadview)

Term 2
Tue Thu   9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Pleasure, Tension, Contention: Literature in England before 1700

This course will provide a series of alternately sparkling and gritty snapshots that together will bring into focus the tensions among canonical traditions and alternate discourses of literary culture in England from the Medieval period to around 1700. This is a tasting menu, not a buffet. Texts are selected to offer a starting point on the vast expanse of content in the first few hundred years of English literary history, organized to lead us to a critical process of collaborative learning rather a high speed overview. We will consider a moderate number of selected readings around conflicts and continuities, both those occurring in the cultures of composition and those emerging subsequently in literary scholarship. At different times, we will interrogate textualizations of the emerging idea of the self, the representation and constitution and destabilizations of presumed-natural notions of gender and difference, the place of social issues and religion in art, the complexity of the English tradition in the much wider world, and the braided threads of love, art and sex.

Want a head start? Consider Middleton and Dekker’s 1611 gender-disruptive comedy The Roaring Girl about a famous female thief.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

British Literature, Cultural Tradition, and Social Change

English 221 surveys British poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fictional prose from the 18^th century to the present. This section spans the upheaval of the Revolution in France (1789) to the War in Somalia (2009). We will read a rich array of texts from The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Volume B (3E) by writers ranging from Edmund Burke to Warsan Shire. By situating British literature in its historical contexts, we will analyze dynamic interrelationships between cultural tradition and social change, extending to the reinterpretations afforded by selected adaptations, documentaries, and performances. Throughout, students will cultivate skills in literary criticism through close engagement with texts as they also compare and contrast forms, issues, and styles within and across historical periods. The course requirements may include a midterm, an essay assignment, and a final examination.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

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

Office: Buchanan Tower 505
Office Hours: Mon, Wed, Fri 2:00-3:00PM (or by appointment)
Email: dallas.hunt@ubc.ca

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.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

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.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

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.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

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).

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri  10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

In this section of English 225 our goal is to study a broad range of poetry written in English.  We will not proceed chronologically but will examine poems of various historical eras, from the Renaissance to the early twenty-first century.  Though we may occasionally consider a poem’s historical context our primary focus will be on its literary elements: form, figurative language, and so on.  Rather than study several poems by a few poets we will probably study a single poem by several, including Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Michael Ondaatje, and Jackie Kay.  “I, too, dislike it,” writes Marianne Moore of poetry in a famous poem entitled ... “Poetry.”  If you don’t already like “it,” I hope you will by the end of the course.

Text: The Broadview Introduction to Literature: Poetry, 2nd edition (Broadview)

Course requirements: two in-class essays (20% each), research essay, 1500 words (30%), final exam (30%)

Term 2
Tue Thu  9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Course description not yet available.

Term 1
Tue Thu   2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The Twentieth-Century African-American Novel

A study of the African-American novelist, concentrated on great works of the second half of the twentieth century and addressing the titanic struggles for civil rights, broader freedoms, and equality in gender and sexuality.

Texts to be read include: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952); James Baldwin, Another Country (1962); Toni Morrison, Sula (1973); Gayl Jones, Corregidora (1975); Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990).

Evaluation: Two five-page close-reading essays, a final exam, and regular participation comprise the core of evaluation.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   3:00 PM- 4:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 1
Tue Thu   3:30 PM- 5:00 PM

Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics

Is a taco a sandwich? What about a hot dog? These questions may lead to a fun debate over dinner, but they also reveal the remarkable nature of the structure of mental categories (such as “sandwich”) and how we decide what does – or doesn’t – belong. In this course, we won’t be able to answer these questions, but we will be able to learn why they are so tricky to answer. To do so, we will explore the field of cognitive linguistics, which is the study of how language and cognition work together to create meaning. Fundamentally, our language is a reflection of how we understand the world around us, as humans living in physical bodies, experiencing the properties of our environment, and engaging in constant social interaction. Therefore, to understand how language works, we must also understand how other cognitive processes work, such as categorization, perception, and mental representations of concepts.

We will begin with learning about how we categorize, organize, reason about, and ultimately linguistically label concepts. This structure provides the basis of understanding how figurative language works, with a focus on metaphor and metonymy. We will then see how these same cognitive tools allow words to acquire multiple meanings (polysemy), and how concepts, words, and grammar all work together to create meaning. Finally, we will consider how our newly acquired understanding of language can be applied to other areas of life, such as politics, advertising, and healthcare. Throughout we will study language in all its forms, including written, spoken, and signed language; gesture; and image.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Identify and understand basic concepts in cognitive linguistics
• Understand the roles of physical, psychological, and sociocultural context in linguistic meaning
• Analyze the linguistic and conceptual structure of a variety of texts
• Apply concepts from cognitive linguistics to other topics and disciplines

The main texts are Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction (2006), by Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green and An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (2006), by Friedrich Ungerer and Hans-Jorg Schmid.

There is no need to purchase anything; all assigned readings will be available online via the UBC Library website.

Term 2
Tue Thu   12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

In this course we’ll reflect about Canadian English, defined as any variety of English spoken and used in Canada. We will distinguish between Standard Canadian English, review the state of our knowledge about it, and other forms of English used in Canada, with a focus on Indigenous Englishes. We will approach Canadian English from sociolinguistic and sociohistorical perspectives: How did it come about? Who decided when that it was its own variety? Why is it the way it is? Is it a colonial form of English? Why do some not know much about it (perhaps you)? Bring a curious and open mind.

Note, this course will be conducted EXCLUSIVELY online

Term 2
Tue Thu  11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

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.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

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.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

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.

Term 2
Tue Thu  2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Synthetic Humans; Posthuman Dystopias

“We make Angels. In the service of Civilization. There were bad angels once … I make good angels now.”
– Niander Wallace, Blade Runner 2049

“Whole generations of disposable people.”– Guinan, “The Measure of a Man”, Star Trek: The Next Generation (season 2)

The near-future and alternate-reality landscapes of science fiction are often terrifying places and have been since Gothic and dystopian impulses intersected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley’s landmark tale evokes dread in the implications of Victor’s generation of a humanoid Creature; this dread echoes in more recent products or accidents of science: clones, robots and replicants, artificial intelligences, cyborgs. Such texts raise issues of gendered exploitation, consciousness and rights, research ethics, and fear, in the realization that these creatures are, ultimately, not human but posthuman, yet often more sympathetic than their makers. However, despite their apparent superiority, such humanoids tend to be defined as commodities. In this course, we will consider the posthuman element of dystopian speculations reflecting on the present and recent past, especially concerning threats of mass surveillance, profit-motivated technology, environmental crisis, and redefinitions of human identity.

Core texts tentatively include William Gibson, Neuromancer; Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, The Matrix: Shooting Script; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve) plus one other film (or shooting script) and/or one other novel.

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.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 1
Tue Thu   11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Comics and Graphic Media

This course is an introduction to comics and other graphic media. In it, we will study some of the major forms--super-hero comics, nonfiction, science fiction, memoirs, and manga--with the goal of developing close reading practices that enrich our understanding of how texts and images work together. Although this course will emphasize longer narratives published after 1980, may make some brief excursions into earlier texts and short forms--comic strips, picture books, and graffiti. The reading list hasn’t been finalized yet, but will likely include selections from Tomie by Junzi Ito; Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud; Batman: Year One by Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli; Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi.

Term 2
Tue Thu  11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 2
Tue Thu  12:30 PM- 2:00 PM

On Literature on Screen

This course will seek to change conversations on book-to-screen adaptations by asking not boring questions of fidelity (is it the same as the book? Yes/no. I love/hate that), but rather, what is significant about the way that stories get told and retold on page and screen. We’ll get the critical and theoretical tools we need to go far beyond those YouTube best/worst/coolest conversations and to level up into the ideological, political or cultural work that gets done, sometimes almost invisibly, by putting on screen a new or old story we think we already know. This course will lean in to literary and critical methodologies more than cinematography and film studies (there’s a different department for that!), and we will spend multiple weeks on each text/film adaptive relationship and what it can tell us. Want to get ahead this summer or on December break? The preliminary reading list focuses around three stories about creating and navigating life: Frankenstein (Karloff v DeNiro); Pride and Prejudice (with Lizzie Bennet Diaries + Bride and Prejudice); and Life of Pi plus a sci-fi short story or two…

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

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.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

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)

Term 2
Tue Thu 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Everything, Everywhere: The Timespace of Racial Capitalism

Analysis of theoretical methods and critical approaches practiced in the discipline of English studies. Required of all students in the English Honours Literature and Language and Literature programs. For ENGL courses at the 200- or 300- level, prior completion of at least one 100- level ENGL course is recommended.

This course focuses on the theories, histories, and philosophies of racial capitalism from its origins, with particular emphasis on its functions in the contemporary moment. This course ranges across different disciplines and regions to survey how race and capitalism have been conjoined both theoretically and materially. Some themes we will explore over the course of the semester include: information capitalism, neoliberalism, ghost labor, borders/ migration, carcerality, (in)debt(edness), anti-capitalism and the popular, the Anthropocene, and so forth. We will particularly be interested in how those social formations correspond and diverge. This course takes a heterogenous and expansive definition of theory; as such, we will engage with myriad forms of texts including music, video games, poetry, performance art, visual art, film, and so forth.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
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.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 - 12:00

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.

Term 1
Tue Thu   12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

What is rhetoric, and how do persuasion and influence work? How you can persuade your friends, family, colleagues, and strangers? Some of the most infamous historical intellectuals vehemently disagree about the answers to these questions, but taken together, their answers provide a blueprint for rhetorical theory. By reading and applying rhetorical theories advanced by important thinkers in major epochs of world history, students will learn about how rhetoric was supposed to function in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient China, the Roman Empire, medieval Arabia, and elsewhere, as well as how these theories still function (or not) today.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Course description not yet available.

Term 1
Tue Thu   2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 2, Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 1
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

The fully online English 321 course offers an introduction to English grammar and its use in everyday communication. We take a descriptive stance when considering the rules of grammar and language variation, starting with the study of words and their parts, proceeding to word classes, phrases and clauses, and concluding with the different communicative functions that grammatical structures can perform when we package information in particular ways. This course equips students with skills for identifying and describing the effects of derived structures in various communicative situations. It provides a strong basis for further study of the English language, language variation, literary and non-literary stylistics and for teaching English.

The course includes numerous graded exercises analyzing sentences and chunks of discourse. A non-graded discussion forum for language questions is conducted throughout the term. There are four short collaborative assignments, two mid-term tests and one final test.

Distribution of grades:

• Exercises: 20%
• Collaborative assignments: 20%
• Test 1: 20%
• Test 2: 20%
• Test 3: 20%

The prescribed books are:

• Börjars, Kersti & Kate Burridge. Introducing English Grammar, 3^rd edition. Routledge, 2019.
• Leech, Geoffrey, Margaret Deuchar and Robert Hoogenraad. English Grammar for Today: A New Introduction. 2^nd ed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

More details are available on the course website on canvas.ubc.ca.

Term 2
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

This fully online course is an introduction to stylistics, the study of style in language. Although stylistics includes literary and non-literary communication, in this course we make a close study of selected examples from each of the three main literary genres. An important aim of this course is to provide students with an understanding of stylistic tools that have been developed since the 1960s to the present. The course both accounts for the main linguistic concepts applied in stylistics and guides students towards applying their knowledge of language and linguistics when describing the style of communication in any text. Consequently, students have strong evidence for interpreting the literary message and can do so with greater insight and accuracy.

Students complete graded and self-testing exercises in which they practice applying the techniques of stylistic analysis to a range of non-literary and literary examples. They participate in two collaborative workshops, the first requiring the stylistic analysis of a poem and the second describing the effect of language use in dramatic dialogue. In the term paper, students provide a guided stylistic analysis of a short story with reference to findings about the author’s style in recent corpus stylistics research. The final exam is an online quiz covering all the material studied during the course.

Distribution of grades:

• Term paper: 30%
• Collaborative Workshop 1: 20%
• Collaborative Workshop 2: 10%
• Graded exercises: 20%
• Discussion forum: 5%
• Final Exam: 15%
  

Prescribed reading:

• Short, Mick. Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose. Longman, 1996.
• Simpson, Paul. Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students, 2^nd ed. Routledge, 2014.

More details are available on the course website on canvas.ubc.ca.

Term 2
Tue Thu  2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

How many Englishes are there? What’s English anyway? What is Canadian English? What is Pidgin English? Is it “different from” or “different than”, “toque”, “hat” or “beanie”? In this class we take a close, conceptual look at linguistic variation in English, to be precise: in Englishes. Beginning with a classic model, we’ll read and discuss texts that model variation in L1, L2 and Lingua Franca Englishes, World Englishes and Global Englishes. We will write short reflection pieces on some texts that will prepare us for a mini in-class conference with friendly feedback and an ensuing term paper on a variety of English of your choice (from a curated list).

Term 1
Tue Thu   12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Cognitive Poetics

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

This class focuses on “everyday metaphors”: the figurative language that we use all the time, over the course of casual conversations and throughout our lives, often without even realizing it. While we may think our colloquial use of language is mostly literal, we rely on metaphors to talk about all sorts of ideas and situations. For example, we may talk about “fighting” crime, “waging war” on a pandemic, or “battling” poverty. In all these cases, we are describing one type of concept - a serious societal challenge - in terms of another concept, physical combat. But what does it mean to describe a pandemic as a “war”, versus a “wildfire” or a “journey”? Not only are these types of patterns pervasive throughout our language use, they also influence how we understand these concepts.

In this course, you will learn how to identify and analyze figurative language in a variety of texts and media, and also consider the persuasive role of metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon. In the first part of the course, we will learn about various types of figurative language (metaphor, metonymy, blending). In the second part, we will apply these theoretical concepts to a range of genres, from health care to poetry. We will also consider the role of figurative language beyond the written and spoken word, such as gesture, memes, and other forms of multimodality.

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Identify and analyse figurative language in a variety of texts, genres, and media
• Understand and apply core concepts in cognitive linguistics, including metaphor theory and frame semantics
• Read and comprehend scholarly articles in the field of metaphor studies
• Develop an original metaphor analysis and present it in spoken and written form
• Engage in critical academic discussion with both peers and scholarly literature

Required textbook: 

Dancygier, Barbara, and Eve Sweetser. Figurative Language. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Term 2
Mon Wed  3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

This course explores and examines contemporary English phonology, morphology and lexical semantics. It begins with the study of speech sounds in English. We apply methods for phonetic transcription and study distinct sounds and possible sound combinations in English (phonology). We study the processes of word formation and word classification in English (morphology). We also study word meaning (lexical semantics) using a variety of approaches.

Upon completion of this course, students will:

• understand the English sound system, including sounds that are used in speech production and the rules and patterns governing their use;
• understand the rules of English word formation and grammatical modification;
• understand different approaches to representing and analyzing lexical meaning;
• demonstrate the ability to formally or diagrammatically represent this knowledge;
• appreciate the nuances of meaning in human language and the conceptual system underlying it.

Required textbook:

Brinton, Laurel J., and Donna M. Brinton. The Linguistic Structure of Modern English. John Benjamins, 2010.

Term 1
Tue Thu 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
ONLINE SYNCHRONOUS

Welcome to this key course for any English major, minor and/or language enthusiast! Do *not* opt out of this course even if you can, just give it a try! Often considered the “tough” stuff of English that everyone wishes they knew, but few actually do, let’s together unlock the beauty of syntactic analysis. Let’s ask questions, let’s try out what the best (or “least bad”) classification for a given structure is. Use this knowledge of English syntax to teach, to sharpen up your own writing, or just to show off your grammatical prowess when you need to do so. Use the knowledge for any of your other languages (and learn to adapt it to these). No prior grammatical knowledge is required. Everyone welcome.

Note, this course will be conducted EXCLUSIVELY online.

Term 1
Tue Thu   2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

On the (pre-)history of television

This course explores the long history and prehistory of television. As technology, television emerged quite slowly from experiments with nineteenth-century technologies (such as telegraphy and phototelegraphy) that reproduce and transmit visual and sound images across space and time. As an institution and medium, television developed out of radio (in the 1930s) to become a standard feature in homes after the 1940s in North America and elsewhere. Even a brief glance at television, as both technology and as institution, quickly opens out onto larger social, political, and cultural histories.

This course approaches these broader histories by reading literature and thinking across media forms. Writing and print, themselves mediums, compete and collaborate with newer media that pertain to writing (based on -graphy technologies). By paying close attention to writing and poetics (ideas about how writing works), we will explore perceptual regimes that accompany new technologies, the media institutions that capture them, and the discourses by which they are understood. Note: our geographical focus will mostly, but not exclusively, be the United States.

This course will be taught as a mix of lecture and discussion. We will read literary, critical, and theoretical texts, watch television, view films, and listen to radio as we seek to gain a deep historical sense of the medium. Our learning objectives include:

• to familiarize students with broader histories of television and its emergence from 19th- and early 20th-century technologies and institutions
• to introduce students to literary tools for approaching media history
• to broaden media literacy by helping students to think and write critically about television and other media

Term 2
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

Media ecologies, 1650 to the present

Although the phrase “media ecology” was coined by education professor Neil Postman in 1970, this course takes its title and its focus from My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, published by literature scholar and media theorist N. Katherine Hayles in 2005. Commenting on the rise of the commercial Internet at the turn of the millennium, and its effects on existing technologies such as the printed book and analog film, Hayles wrote that “media can converge into digitality and simultaneously diverge into a robust media ecology in which new media represent and are represented in old media” (32, emphasis in original). Hayles here criticizes more conventional models of media history, which tend to explain the coming and spread of new (most recently digital) media forms using competition and predation analogies in which one kind of media form absorbs and defeats the others. These models yield in Hayles’s telling to a model of “coevolution” that focuses on relationships, encounters, and exchanges between media forms (32). In Hayles’s analysis, the word “media” refers to technologies, means of and devices for storing and conveying information and experience. This course builds on Hayles’s emphases on coexistence and coevolution while also examining the history of the idea of “media” and “mediation” itself, from the early modern period to the present. The course is organized comparatively, bringing digital and print media forms into conversation, and its learning design and assessments draw on comparative modes of inquiry. The course combines theoretical and historical reading and investigation with hands-on, project-based learning. You will investigate the historical development of knowledge technologies, broadly understood, explore their practical use, consider what it means to inquire into the experiences and lives of those who have worked with and used them, and use digital and analog media to organize and explain your findings. You will also engage with media ecologies in a second sense, considering the relationship between media, their material qualities, and the resources and practices of the surrounding world. You will also consider literary texts that reflect on their own relationship to media and mediation, bringing questions of media history and media theory productively into view.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

This course examines the history of books that have flaps, foldouts, popups, wheels, flip movies, and so on. While such books are as old as the book itself, they are most often overlooked in histories of the book. The course approaches the book as a medium, as a process, rather than as an inert product of the printing press. The learning outcomes of the course include an understanding of the book as a cultural technique of enormous importance historically; a basic understanding of media history; and an interactive understanding of book technology through panel presentations on specific books (provided by the instructor), and through the demonstration copies of books from the instructor’s collection that will be circulated in the classroom.

Term 1
Tue Thu   12:30 PM- 2:00 PM

Old English Language and Translation

“You must remember we knew nothing of [Old English]; each word was a kind of talisman we unearthed…And with those words we became almost drunk.” –Jorge Luis Borges, “Blindness”

Old English, the earliest form of English, offers an uncanny sensation: so different from present-day English that it must be studied as a foreign language, it is an ancestor whose patterns reveal themselves quickly to the learner. Old English literature is strange, intimate, and violent: a general falls into his bed after a woman’s brutal swordstroke; a feud erupts at a wedding; a tree, torn from the wilderness to become an unwilling instrument of torture, clings to Christ in what Borges calls a lovers’ embrace. This literature is usually read in translation, but in this class you will begin to read it in the original. You will learn the fundamentals of Old English grammar, syntax, and vocabulary; specialized poetic vocabulary and the basic rules of poetic composition; and unusual features that have been lost in the journey from Old to present-day English.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

The Arthur of the Britons

King Arthur, Lancelot, Guenevere, the Round Table, the Holy Grail - these names familiar to many of us, but how did that happen? How did stories that originated in early medieval Britain end up so widespread and popular that they’re still being retold today? In this course, we go back to the beginning. We’ll look at the strange Welsh poems and tales that might show us the oldest versions of Arthur. We will read the twelfth-century Latin history that gave the world the first connected life story for Arthur. These texts will be read in translation, but we’ll also read poetry and prose in Middle English, moving gently through the amazing alliterative poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as well as Sir Thomas Malory’s prose Morte D’Arthur, the text most responsible for passing the stories of Arthur and his knights to the post-medieval English-speaking world. There’s an apartment building in Vancouver called “Sir Galahad” – by the end of this course, you’ll recognize the reference, and also be able to appreciate just how weird it really is…

Required Texts:

• The Mabinogion, translated by Sioned Davies
• The History of the Kings of Britain, translated by Michael Faletra
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Broadview facing-page edition (translated by James Winny)
• Sir Thomas Malory, The Morte Darthur, Oxford World’s Classics edition

Term 1
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

Love and Honour: Medieval Chivalry and Courtly Love

The courtly poetry of medieval Europe develops out of a vibrant reimagining of elite culture in the twelfth-century that spread like wild-fire across the courts of Europe. The development of the entwined ideologies of chivalry and courtly love (fin amour) create an environment that produces some of the masterpieces of European literature. This course examines these two social phenomena from their origins in the twelfth-century court culture exemplified by the poetry of Chrétien de Troyes, Andreas Capellanus, and others, through to the flourishing of literary activity in the world of fourteenth-century England.

We will read a range of medieval texts, some in modern translation and some in the original Middle English, ranging from Chrétien’s Lancelot, selections from chivalric manuals, secular and religious love lyrics, Sir Perceval of Gales, to the popular romance The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnall. Finally, as the capstone text of the course, we read the alliterative Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a complex meditation on honour, love, the natural world, and the search for human perfection. This classic text, long central to the canon of English literature, will be examined through lenses both traditional and contemporary, asking not only what it meant in its fourteenth-century context, but what it continues to mean to us today in our own time of cultural and environmental crisis.

Term 1
Tue Thu   2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A World of Words and a Sea of Stories

With the help of a reader-friendly edition and a series of structured but gentle lessons, you will acquire facility in reading Chaucer’s Middle English. More importantly, you will learn how Chaucer makes use of his language’s power in assembling a series of narratives ostensibly told by the diverse company of pilgrims he met on the way to Canterbury. The pilgrims’ tales create a conversation about many themes, including class, love, sex and gender, work, language, the nature of narrative itself, and the pleasures and travails of studenthood, and our class meetings will reflect the collection’s spirit with regular sessions of open discussion. We will consider the linguistic and literary innovations that led readers to consider Chaucer the “father of English poetry” together with the sense of humour – by turns satirical, bawdy, and self-deprecating – that makes reading his poetry a constant joy.

Term 2
Tue Thu  2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Madness and Folly in the Renaissance

Madness and folly fascinated Renaissance humanists, who celebrated the figure of the “witty jester” or “wise fool” in their writings. In this course, we will explore various depictions of “unreason” or irrationality in Renaissance texts, paying particular attention to the paradoxical discourses that often seem to accompany such representations. Among others, we will examine descriptions of love as a malady in early modern medicine and as a source of inspiration in Neo-Platonic, Petrarchist, and Elizabethan poetry, analyze the age-old association between melancholy and genius in humoral theory, consider the power of the imagination in Montaigne’s Essays, and compare playful personifications of Folly in works by Erasmus and Louise Labé. We will also study representations of madness and folly in two of Shakespeare’s tragedies (Hamlet and King Lear) along with some more recent readings from cultural theory and the social sciences.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Shakespeare’s London

Our lecture-based course focuses on “London” in Shakespeare’s drama. Shakespeare never wrote a play set in contemporary London, as many of his playwrighting colleagues did. The capital is only explicitly featured in his plays about England’s historical past. It is nonetheless often argued that the towns and urban centers where other Shakespearean plays are set actually serve as screens for this growing metropolis. Our course will survey three of Shakespeare’s history plays set in London; one of his plays whose setting is perhaps a screen for London; and three plays about contemporary London that were written by Shakespeare’s colleagues. Our course topics will be the poetics of historiography, London’s urban geography, and representations of royalty and immigrants, and elites and laborers in these plays.

Readings will include Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 and The Merry Wives of Windsor; the Shakespearean collaborations Sir Thomas More and Henry VIII (All is True); The London Prodigal, which used to be attributed to Shakespeare; Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s Roaring Girl. There will be 2 in-class exams and a final essay.

Term 2
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

Term 2, TR  12:30 - 2:00

Course description not yet available.

Term 2
TR  9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Course description not yet available.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

So much drama! Eighteenth-century Theatre

After the silence of the Puritan Commonwealth, London’s theatres burst into social, artistic and ideological prominence (and no small fabulousness) with the restoration of King Charles II. Through tragedy, burlesque, and several types of comedy, plays contributed to cultural dialogues on the relative identities of the nation and the individual through sites of tension among conflicting elements like noble heroics, brilliant wit, political subversion, historical revisionism, and some rather explicit sex. We will consider the ways that English playwrights and stage practices echoed and interrogated the implications the ways the dramatic genres of the era embraced both spectatorship and readership and made the political into the (very) personal.

Looking for a head start this summer?

Consider the pairing of Wycherley’s Country Wife and Behn’s The Rover, two very different takes—sparkling and pitch dark—on the stakes and implications of the Restoration’s most lasting genre, the ostensible comedy of libertine seduction. Or the quite startling, proto-postmodern comedy with a Nabokov-esque mad editor in Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies.

Term 1
Tue Thu   2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Making Middle-Class Girls: Gender, Class, Education, and Unspoken Anxieties in Eighteenth-Century Writing for Youth

Ever since the emergence during the mid-seventeenth century of books addressed to children and adolescents, parents and educators have worried about the detrimental effects of reading on the young. While adults’ anxiety rarely reached levels reflected in today’s fevered debates about libraries and school curricula (panic surrounding the erotic dimensions of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) being a notable exception), eighteenth-century writers regularly reassured parents and guardians of the educational value of the works they wrote for youth. In this course, we’ll look at the careful balancing act performed by eighteenth-century writers who hoped to entertain one group of readers, middle-class girls, while preparing them for the demands of adult life. In doing so, we’ll consider a range of concerns these writers explicitly addressed, including the duty of daughters to parents, guardians, and God, the challenge of distinguishing appropriate suitors from merely fashionable ones, and the social and domestic obligations of the middle-class wife. We’ll also consider a very different concern that, because it sparked anxiety among parents and educators who wanted to shield youth from the dangers of the world, was for the most part relegated to the edges of texts or represented figuratively—the looming challenge of adult sexuality.

Readings will include fairy tales by Charles Perrault and Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont, Sarah Fielding’s The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy, Mary Ann Kilner’s The Adventures of a Pincushion, Designed Chiefly for the Use of Young Ladies, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s, Original Stories from Real Life, along with short excerpts from works by John Locke, John Bunyan, Samuel Richardson, and Maria Edgeworth.

Term 1
Tue Thu  9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

“Stranger Things:”  Romanticism and Society, Then and Now

Following the 18th Century revolutions in France and the U.S., Romanticism was the original cultural response to the same forms of democratic politics, consumer capitalism, patriarchy, globalism and imperialism that continue to organize our world today.  Key Romantic concerns pervade culture today so thoroughly that we forget their historical origins: our incalculable potential for god-like creativity; our unavoidable subjection to unpredictable change and trauma; and, above all, the radical, dynamic interconnectedness of everything (of the familiar and the strange, nature and technology, individual and collective, local and global, activity and passivity, sophistication and naiveté, etc.)  This class examines Romanticism's founding documents and recent echoes to illuminate not just our history but ourselves.

Required Texts:

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
• Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
• Jane Austen, Persuasion
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM- 1:00 PM

Romantic Poetry: Space, Environment, Media

This course invites students to consider how the poetry and poetics of the Romantic period conceives of space and environment in ways that remain fundamental and important today. How, we will ask, does poetry and poetic language help us not simply to represent the world, but actually to create it or perhaps imagine alternatives to it? And how does reading this poetry enable us to recognize (that is, see or know again) with new eyes and encourage us to make it different? In other words, we will think about these poems as creative acts of mediation. We will read examples of several popular poetic genres from the Romantic period including songs, ballads, sonnets, odes, and fragments. These will be supplemented by selections of poetic and aesthetic theory, political, religious, and scientific writing, and paintings, illustrations, and sculptures so that we can gain a sense of what people in the period imagined the spaces and environments around them to be and how they used those imaginary spaces to engage and re-orient (still) urgent issues like race, gender, climate, and power. Our readings will feature some famous, and some not-so famous Romantic poems, but all of them will be manageable (i.e. SHORT) so that we can spend as much time as one-hour class sessions allow attending to their language, imagery, and operations. Students will be invited to participate in poetry’s world-making capacities by building on and against Romantic poetics in class activities, writing assignments, and creative projects.

Required Texts: The Broadview Anthology of Romantic Poetry (ed. Black et al., 2016)

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

This survey of US literature to 1890 is organized around the theme of the self: Self-making, self-deception, self-reliance, self-expression, self-deception, self-representation, etc. We will begin with a hip hop opera based on the biography of the US’s first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, one of the first self-made men in America. We will then read nonfiction about self-reliance by an early environmentalist (Thoreau) and a US philosopher (Emerson); lyric (self-expressive) poetry by Whitman and Dickinson; and life writing by a former slave (Jacobs) and the first Asian American author (Sui Sin Far). The course will wrap up with a novel written by 13 contributors that confronts the American mythology of self-making OR a recent book about five generations of a Chinese American family. 

Texts may include: 

• Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution 
• Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841)
• Selections from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself
• Emily Dickinson’s selected poems
• Henry David Thoreau’s memoir, Walden (1854) 
• Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno (1852) in Billy Budd, Bartleby , and Other Stories
• Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
• Sui Sin Far’s memoir, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909) 
• Elizabeth Jordan’s ed. Composite novel The Sturdy Oak (1917)
• Ava Chin, Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming (2023)

Term 1
Tue Thu  11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Popular Victorian Fiction from Page to Stage

“No, I haven’t read it – but I saw the play!” In the nineteenth century, stage adaptations helped to create and to sustain a novel’s popular success, much as screen adaptations do today. In this course we will explore how and why Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd became – and have remained – so popular with readers, script writers, and theatre-goers. Questions that we will ask include: why is Jane Eyre one of the most popular English novels ever written, inspiring successive generations of authors and artists of every description? How did Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland become a culture-text, a text that occupies such a prominent place in the popular imagination that it is collectively known and “remembered” even when the original work has never been read? Why has Far from the Madding Crowd been popularly defined in seemingly contradictory ways: as sensation fiction, pastoral idyll, traditional ballad, love story, and realistic novel?

As we attempt to answer these and other questions of cultural production, we will also explore the ideological assumptions – with respect to gender, race, class, sexuality, mental and physical ability, the environment, ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, etc. – implicit in the novels and in a selection of stage adaptations from the Victorian period to the present, and in our (and the Victorians’) readings of them.

Pre-reading of at least one of our longer novels (Jane Eyre and Far from the Madding Crowd) is highly recommended.

Reading and viewing list: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World's Classics); Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor, adapted by John Courtney, 1848 (Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848-1898, UBC Library); Jane Eyre, devised by the Company and directed by Sally Cookson, 2015 (Drama Online, UBC Library); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview); Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Dream Play, in Two Acts, for Children and Others, Act I, adapted by Henry Savile Clarke, music by Walter Slaughter, 1886 (the script will be posted on Canvas, the score is posted by the University of Rochester, and links to recordings, including the 2020 University of Kent performance, are posted on Lewis Carroll Resources); wonder.land, directed by Rufus Norris, lyrics and text by Moira Buffini, music by Damon Albarn, 2015 (Drama Online, UBC Library); Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (Oxford World's Classics); Far from the Madding Crowd, adapted by Joseph Comyns Carr and Thomas Hardy, 1882 (to be posted on Canvas); a twenty-first century adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd TBD.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Middlemarch, Roots and Branches

Anthony Trollope called Middlemarch the first “psychologically realistic” novel; Virginia Woolf “the first novel for grown-up people.”  Despairing of any more precise definition, William James called Middlemarch "fuller of human stuff than any novel ever written."  What "human stuff" is supposed to mean, James, the first modern psychologist, lets Middlemarch define.

Middlemarch outgrows prior novels’ psychological naïveté like its protagonist Dorothea outgrows her typically feminine "toy-box education."  Middlemarch explores the actual experience, frustrations and disappointments of modern mass society, detailing ongoing developments in politics, science and technology, communication, transportation and medicine.  "George Eliot" was the publicly-known pseudonym for Mary Anne Evans since after her first novel Adam Bede became a big success, her subsequent novels and essays made her the dominant literary voice of her time, and after Eliot (also like Dorothea) endured intense public shaming, ostracism and legal jeopardy, due to her love life.  The story of Dorothea’s liberation from patriarchy is above all the story of the liberation of a newly self-conscious reading public, asserting its own capacity to question patriarchal narratives.

Despite its modern, grown-up realism, Eliot herself called Middlemarch a “domestic epic," as if Homerically singing the dramas of ordinary, prosaic, modern family life.  Indeed, a literal translation of "Middlemarch" is "in medias res"--'beginning in the middle'--the narrative form typical of epic poetry:  dramatizing individual lives and events marching to the pulse of mythically large, systemic forces and patterns, and inviting contemporary mass-market literary consumers to do likewise.

Middlemarch breaks apart the imperial complacency of the Victorian era, showing modernity emerging from the revolutionary poetry of Romanticism, Ludwig Feuerbach's radical materialist and socialist rewriting of Christianity, Darwin's new science, and new technologies like the microscope and railway, demolished presumptions about the nature of space and time and identity.   The ultimate distinction of Middlemarch, perhaps, is to teach readers to recognize and appreciate distinctness itself--the distinctness of any individual's experience--as paradoxically integral to modernity's new cultures and technologies of global interconnectedness.

Term 2
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

A World of Shadows and Monsters: Imagining the Supernatural in Victorian Literature

This 13-week, fully asynchronous course examines several genres of literature popular in the nineteenth-century, while focusing on the place of the supernatural in that literature. At a time of great change, socially, financially, scientifically and on a broader level, politically, many writers of fiction turned to the supernatural as a way to mediate this experience of change. This course will explore how some of the most popular writers of the century, including Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and R.L. Stevenson, engaged with the supernatural and with the contemporary issues of social justice. Our core textbook, The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: The Victorian Era, 3rd edition, includes several of our texts, but we will also use stand-alone editions of others. This course will require essays, regular discussion and peer review contributions and a final examination that will be invigilated via Zoom.

Term 2
Tue Thu  9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Haunted Landscapes of Gothic Modernism

“in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought” -- Mrs. Dalloway

Modernism was born out of seismic, revolutionary shifts in society and culture. World wars, political revolutions in Europe and beyond, murderous civil and colonial/imperial wars, economic depression, and successive waves of technological modernization offering mixed psychological and social benefits and injuries laid siege to assumptions that the world was in any way well-ordered or reliably understood. Its literature both reflects conscious innovation and experiment and sometimes opposes these passions for change. Its obsessions respond in complex ways to those seismic shifts in its representations of gender and sexuality, social structures, race and culture, in all cases often in terms of transgression.

And yet, in its drive to make things new, Modernist literature is often a haunted place: spectres of ancestry, of war, of places escaped from collide with the present moment, creating a dark, Gothic modernity. This troubled place will be our focus as winter turns to spring.

Texts: Core texts tentatively include Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (to be read as a Modernism precursor), Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison; D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; James Joyce, “The Dead”; and Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude” and “At the Bay”; plus perhaps one more work of short fiction.

Evaluation: Evaluation will 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.

Term 1, ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

Some descriptions of Modernism offer bloodless abstractions about formal experimentation, academic disruption, and reactions against conventional morality. This course concentrates on the wildly passionate commitment of moderns to changing the world, to finding new sensations and affects, to overcoming historical evils and biases, to appreciating with sincere admiration other arts, other cultures and languages, and other places. The practices of the literary avant-garde may be a kind of cosmopolitanism of the arts, opening borders between different aesthetic media, traditions, and forms, to correspond with the opening up of the planet’s borders through technologies of speed in movement and communication. This course analyzes Modernism through the lens of its discrete experimental literary and artistic movements, networks, manifestos, and performances. Topics include Decadence, the New Woman, Expressionism, Manifesto Modernism, Impressionism, Surreality, Psychoanalysis, Minimalism, Technological Modernity, and Graphic Modernisms. Writers include Stein, Yeats, Rhys, Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Conrad, others.

Term 1
Tue Thu   11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

 Modern Novels and Contemporary Crises: Trans/historical Approaches

English 366 engages with canonical and controversial Anglo-American novels on modern social crises. Between World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945), many intellectuals confronted a world that seemed to be in ruins: the unsettling epoch stimulated aesthetic innovations and ideological risks in prose fiction. Attending closely to these contested issues and experimental modes, our multidisciplinary discussions will encompass topics such as war and peace (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway); industry and ecology (D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath); and fascism and democracy (Richard Wright, Native Son and George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four). The questions raised by the interwar novel resonate today. Hence, this class highlights trans/historical approaches to modern fictions to explore contemporary struggles to re-imagine forms of collectivity in the midst of protracted military conflicts, accelerating environmental degradation, and persistent civil divisions. The course requirements may include a midterm, an essay assignment, and a final examination. Please note that discretion is advised: this course focuses on mature subject-matter.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Eros and Death in the Modern American Novel

• Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
• Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (1923)
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)
• William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (1939)

We'll explore the ways in which these novels represent the power of the life drive (eros, desire, fantasy, sexuality, freedom, praxis) as it struggles against a range of repressive realities, including the often vicious social divisions of race, class, labour, and gender. Our analytical key words will include dream, imagination, the unconscious, narcissism, symbolism, condensation, displacement, repression, repetition, law, censorship, the uncanny, Eden, wasteland, pastoral, aphanasis (the fading or the disappearance of a star, of desire), death, mortality. 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." Students will also write three short essays (one in class) based on close reading of a literary text. There will be a final exam. Classroom conversation will be encouraged. Attendance will be taken.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 - 12:00

Post-Apartheid South African Literature

“It was easier to write about the past . . . because the past created ready-made stories. There was a very clear demarcation between good and evil . . . Black was good; white was bad.  Your conflict was there. There were no gray areas. We no longer have that. In this new situation, black is not necessarily good. There are many black culprits; there are many good white people. We have become normal. It’s very painful to become normal.” (Zakes Mda)

Fifty years of oppression under the South African apartheid system inspired an impressive corpus of protest literature, but how have writers responded to the collapse of the racist regime and its replacement with a democratic constitution?  Our study of recent South African writing will include Zoë Wicomb’s David’s Story, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor and Sello Diuker’s Thirteen Cents.

Term 2
Tue Thu   9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Email: c.kim@ubc.ca

The Cold War in Asia: Asian American and Asian Canadian Responses

The period post-WWII until the 1980s is conventionally understood in the West as the Cold War. Marked by events such as the Cuban missile crisis, the war in Vietnam, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, these years are remembered as a tense time when it seemed that the conflict between communist and capalist democratic ideologies might result in the outbreak of nuclear war. At the same time, it is important to remember that these same tensions played out very differently in Asia and took the form of multiple bloody and violent wars.  This course will return to this historical period in order to rethink what is conventionally remembered in the West as a conflict between the US and the USSR as a struggle that also involved—and, indeed, was staged in—Asia.

By reading novels, a novella, poetry, and a memoir that move us through the Chinese civil war, the Korean war, the wars in Southeast Asia, and North Korea, we will explore the legacies of Cold War logics and the afterlife of the wars in Asia for Canadians and Americans. How do these contradictory memories and competing historical narratives shape how Asians in North America imagine themselves and are understood by non-Asians? How does what critic Jodi Kim calls the “protracted afterlife” of the Cold War continue to influence current conversations about migration, citizenship, and global events and politics? We will contextualize our discussions of these literary texts with critical and theoretical material and documentary films in order to think critically about these competing cultural representations and the narratives they produce.

Required Readings (subject to change):

• Samantha Lan Chang, Hunger
• Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker
• Madeleine Thien, Dogs at the Perimeter
• Souvankham Thammavongsa, Found
• Y-Dang Troeung, Landbridge

Additional theoretical readings will be available via UBC Library.

Course Evaluation (subject to change)

• Participation - 10%
• Reading Quizzes (2x5%) - 10%
• Close Reading Essay (600 words)  - 15%
• Creative Assignment (response + 600 words) -  25%
• Research Essay Proposal - 5%
• Research Essay (1800 words) - 35%

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 2
ONLINE/ASYNCHRONOUS

In this course, we will be reading, thinking, writing, and speaking about Canada and Canadian literature. These are contested terms, concepts, and “territories.” What is Canada? How did it get this way? What is Canadian literature, or "Canlit"? What is its history and present context? Why do some writers want to “break up” with Canlit, or call it a “dumpster fire”? We'll be reading and listening to poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and interviews; watching film and video clips; writing discussion board posts and essays; and developing creative projects.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Office: Buchanan Tower 505
Office Hours: Monday, Wednesday, & Friday 2-3:00PM (or by appointment)
Email: dallas.hunt@ubc.ca 

NDN Time: Past and Presents Erased, Futures Foreclosed

This course will examine how different populations stake particular claims to the future, and the political, existential, epistemological, and ontological ramifications of these claims. This work is interested and attentive to the ways in which Indigenous peoples are often written out of the futures that are imagined in mainstream speculative and science fiction texts, while also remaining as a spectral, disavowed presence in contemporary life. In response, this course foregrounds Indigenous futurisms, the otherwise worlds they propose, and the radical futurities they cultivate, while grappling with the present colonial conditions that we must contend with in order to make these futurities vibrant realities. This course intends to foster deepened engagement with the topic of Indigenous futurities, and its relationship to contemporary social and ecological challenges in settler colonial societies. It will result in varying engagements with Indigenous notions of time, kinship, change, and continuity. These notions offer different modes of imagining possible shared futures than are often presented in mainstream texts. The course will feature engagements with scholars, artists, and writers working within the fields of speculative futures, as well as scholars working on ideas of settler replacement, elimination, and self-Indigenization  This course, however, differs from these accounts by situating and framing these issues through a futurist lens, and unpacking how depictions of what José Estaban Muñoz (2009) describes as a “forward- dawning futurity” comes to bear on the present and the political, social, and artistic projects in which many settlers are invested. Finally, This course will foreground the voices of Indigenous peoples, especially as it pertains to articulations of the future for Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities. In doing so, we will aim to decentre settler colonial narratives, and centre the radical alternatives Indigenous futurities have to offer.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 2
Tue Thu   2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Nationalism and Globalization in Postcolonial Literature

The era of decolonization and postcolonial independence in the second half of the twentieth century heralded the arrival of multiple new nation-states on the global stage. This course will survey key postcolonial texts to think about the politics of nationalism: how did nationalism fuel anti-colonial and pro-independence movements? What kinds of political hopes and promises were invested in the formation of new nation-states? How did nationalism mask social and gender inequities in these new political entities? And how did the forces of globalization and economic neocolonialism continue to shape the histories of these nation-states, even as these countries achieved political independence? To keep a tighter literary, political, and geographical focus, it is likely that the reading list will be drawn to a large extent from African literature. Texts we may read include: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart; Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born; Ngugi Wa Thiong’O’s Petals of Blood, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions; Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place; J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace; and Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go. Assessment will take the form of regular reading quizzes, active participation, essays, and in-class exams.

Term 2
Tue Thu  12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Moving Images, Moving Texts: Adaptation, Migration, and World Literature

“For me Africa is like the seas Melville missed so much.” – Claire Denis on Beau Travail

Modernity is defined by movement: movements of people, movements of capital, and the movements of narrative. What possibilities emerge when we bring these movements into conversation? Does the transformation of text into image, or moving image into text, allow us to rethink our relationship to migration, to contemporary history, and to cultural influence?

Drawing on a range of texts and films, we’ll look to bring together a range of otherwise distant people, spaces, and times into conversation. How does Herman Melville’s Billy Budd allow Claire Denis to interrogate the remnants of France’s colonial empire in East Africa in Beau Travail? Why might Nicole Krauss’s narrator in “Seeing Ershadi” be convinced that she has glimpsed the lead of Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry? Why might Mati Diop transform her own short documentary about the hardships of economic refugees, Atlantiques, into a fantastical love story, Atlantics?

Other texts include (subject to change):

• William Faulkner - Barn Burning
• Haruki Murakami -  Barn Burning
• Lee Chang-Dong (dir.) - Burning
• Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis
• Marjane Satrapi and Winshluss (dir.) – Persepolis
• Susan Orlean - The Orchid Thief
• Spike Jonze - Adaptation

Term 1
ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

Coming of Age from the Margins: Youth, Migration, and Contemporary World Literature

This asynchronous online course draws on a range of texts from around the world to ask how contemporary literature has represented and responded to crucial issues that mark our experience of the 21st century. Focusing on the stories of young protagonists from a diverse range of settings, we will explore how migration shapes what it means to be young in the modern world, and how youth shapes our experiences of migration. Drawing on novels, short stories, and an autobiographical graphic novel, this course encourages students to think about questions of belonging, race, gender, and sexuality beyond the familiar frameworks provided by the nation-state and traditional literary forms. Texts studied include Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad, Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Binti by Nnedi Okorafor.

Term 1
Tue Thu   11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

U.S. Fiction of the 1970s

This course will examine an under-studied and often misunderstood era in U.S. fiction, asking what kinds of traditions the great writers of the 1970s tapped into, what literary experiments they performed, and why. I will point us to some necessary historical background (on the Vietnam War, on countercultural legacies, on racial relations, on Nixon, etc.), but our main object of curiosity will be the undercurrents of paranoia, disillusionment, and “feel” for the times that these textual artifacts effect. It should be, like all deep reading experiences, a great adventure. Students will participate in discussions and write two analytical essays, each about 1500 words in length, and a final exam. Texts will include: Joan Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album” (essays); Don DeLillo, End Zone; Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon; Octavia Butler, Kindred; Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato; and Joan Didion, Democracy.

Term 2
Tue Thu   11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 1
Mon Wed Fri   11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Children’s and YA Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora

Children’s literature addressing the lives and concerns of Black youth, both in Africa and the African diaspora, is a flourishing sub-genre. In this course we will explore a range of contemporary texts including Chinua Achebe’s Chike and the River, Akwaeke Emezi’s Pet, Kacen Callender’s Felix Ever After, Lawrence Hill’s Beatrice and Croc Henry, Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down, Adaobe Tricia Nwaubani’s Buried Beneath the Baobob Tree, Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, and Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch. These very diverse texts explore issues of identity, black representation, police violence, trans and queer experience, and include works of realism, fantasy, and a novel in poems.

As well as focusing on the core texts, we will engage with theoretical perspectives on children’s literature and YA fiction, and its increasingly fluid contemporary incarnations. Students will be encouraged to develop independent critical responses to both texts and theories. Assessment will include a critical response, an in-class essay, a term paper and a final examination.

Term 2
Mon Wed Fri   2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Posthuman Bodies, Cybernetic Selves: Responses to Technology in Writing for Young Adults

“We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism.” -- Ihab Hassan, "Prometheus as Performer"

What happens when young adult literature, which has traditionally guided adolescent readers through the task of identity formation, confronts technologies that trouble long-standing assumptions about what it means to be a self—or even a human? We will explore this question by examining recent novels, many of them dystopias, in which non-human entities lay claim to selfhood and humans are surgically, mechanically, and computationally altered in ways that call into question the very idea of human nature. Along the way, we will consider the relationship between young adult fiction and what Ihab Hassan, in an essay almost everyone interested in the topic eventually ends up quoting, called posthumanism. We will also take some opportunities to consider own relationship to--and status as--posthuman beings.

Reading:

Readings will include Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time;  Osamu Tezuka, “The Birth of Astro Boy”; Peter Dickinson, Eva; Neal Shusterman, Unwind; Robin Wasserman, Frozen; M.T. Anderson, Feed; Bernard Beckett, Genesis (2006); Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele, The Surrogates (2006)

Term 1
ONLINE ASYCHRONOUS

English 392 is a 14-week course that will guide you in the study and approaches to some classic Western texts and approaches to children's literature. The focus will be on British fantasy literature, by authors such as Gaiman, Tolkien, Pullman and Rowling, but we will also explore some connections with texts from other cultures. Our fully asynchronous course is part of the English Online Minor program in the Department of English Language and Literatures, but is open to English majors and to students in other programs such as Education, Language and Literacy, and Library and Information Studies. You will be reading novels, short stories and scholarly articles on children's literature throughout this term, and you will be sharing your ideas both formally, in the form of essays, and informally, in the form of discussion posts, peer reviews and games.

Term 2
Tue Thu   9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

The Lives of Plants

This is a special topics course in “Ecocriticism.” It will introduce students to critical plant studies, which is a multidisciplinary field that centers the lives of plants. Plants nourish us; they can also please us, terrify us, physiologically alter us, and re/frame how we conceptualize long anthropocentric histories of empire, gender, race, and sexuality. Our readings will range across philosophy, Indigenous (Potawatomi) storytelling, anthropology, history, landscape design, the visual arts, film, and literary writing (poetry, memoir, short fiction). Expect to read lengthier texts by Amitav Ghosh, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeff VanderMeer.

There will be 2 in-class exams and a final term paper.

Term 1
Tue Thu   9:30 AM- 11:00 AM

British Drama Since 1956

Histories of post-WWII British drama often point to 1956 as a watershed year. The year marked the celebrated success of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a play which, in its examination and criticism of a post-war, class-ridden British society, recorded the frustration of the younger British generation (the so-called “angry young men”) with the traditional values of the “Establishment,” and signalled the beginning of a dramatic revival in Britain. The late 1950s initiated an explosion of dramatic activity that gave rise to the most exciting age of British drama since the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. A growing interest in international theatre, increased government funding, the growth of regional repertory theatre, and radical changes in the social structure of the nation all contributed to a revitalized theatrical environment during the 1960s and 1970s. And though later cutbacks in public funding at times threatened their livelihood, British playwrights continued to address in vital and exciting ways many of the important and often contentious issues facing British society during and after Thatcherism. In this course, we will survey a cross-section of British drama since 1956, ranging from the plays of the angry young men and women (Osborne; Shelagh Delaney) to the work of such seminal playwrights as Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill to more recent attempts by playwrights such as Ayub Khan-Din, Mark Ravenhill, Sarah Kane, Martin McDonagh, and debbie tucker green to articulate new ways of exploring theatrical representation.

Term 1
Tue  2:00 PM- 4:00 PM

Attitudes towards Canadian English

In the 1960s, the idea of a Standard Canadian English was conceptualized and illustrated to Canadians and the world in a series of four dictionaries. While in the 1970s many speakers were still somewhat sceptical about Canadian English as a “thing”, by the early 2000s the situation was very different. In this course we’ll learn about Canadian English and then aim to contribute to the existing knowledge pool as a capstone project. We will gather and analyze new data on what people think about “Canadian English”. You will learn how to write a linguistic survey, how to gather data and, most important of all, how to analyze the data using Excel. You will learn to write a paper on one variable from the survey, present work-in-progress in a class presentation and use feedback to improve your paper. Linguistic attitudes have long been neglected. In this course we’ll shine a light on them and show the real-life consequences of how people feel about their language(s).

Term 2
Tue   10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Non-Western Rhetorical Traditions

How did Buddha compel his smartest acolytes to seek enlightenment without simultaneously confusing the masses? How might one logically prove the veracity of reincarnation within the Vedic system? How did future Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre motivate anti-colonial revolution? Can a single word communicate the entirety of human wisdom? This seminar will focus on Buddhist, Taoist, and Vedic theories of persuasion, as well as taking a look at 20^th century international theories of propaganda.

Term 1
Mon   10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Modern Political Fictions and Democracy

This course uses literary analysis and critical and cultural theory to understand the genre of modern political fiction and its role in public culture. We will also extrapolate some of our findings to the contemporary moment. When Eloise Knapp Hay discusses T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) as a poem of “radical doubt and negation,” she argues that its city made no “convincing allusions… to St. Augustine's vision of interpenetration between the City of God and the City of Man in this world.” That vision of divine interpenetration was the unconscious of Anglophone political fiction for many centuries, the eternalized Form of social Utopia. But toward what does modern democratic politics gesture when the ideal City of God is unavailable as a schema?

Modernism and its kinfolk carried out a lengthy thought-experiment during much of the twentieth century, devising new political fictions without the support of a divine guarantee of goodness. We will read a set of novels, shorter fiction, poems, and drama whose politics are overt and whose aesthetic prowess is distinctive, but not straightforward. We will support our literary readings with nonfiction essays by writers such as Woolf, Conrad, and Orwell, and theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, and Raymond Williams.

Preliminary book list:

• Sean O’Casey, The Dublin Plays
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
•  Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here
• George Orwell, Animal Farm
• Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman
• Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle
• Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Term 1
Tue  9:30 AM - 11:30 AM

Medieval Meets Modern - Adapting Medieval English Literature

Medieval literature can seem very distant from our present time, and yet certain texts have proven endlessly interesting to readers and creative artists for centuries, right up to our own moment. In her 2012 book How Soon is Now?, Carolyn Dinshaw explores the intersection between medieval texts and modern readers through “asynchrony: different time frames or temporal systems colliding in a single moment of now.” In this course we will explore such moments of collision by focusing on two medieval texts and some 21st-century responses to them. We will start with Beowulf, an Old English heroic poem that we will read, first, in a facing-page translation. Then we will look at two works by Maria Dahvana Headley, her 2018 novel speaking back to Beowulf, called The Mere Wife, and her own, resolutely modern, poetic translation of the poem, from 2020. Our second medieval text will be Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, from the Canterbury Tales. We will read selections of Chaucer in Middle English with facing-page translation, and then we will look at poetic responses from Jean Binta Breeze (“The Wife of Bath in Brixton Market”) and Patience Agbabi (Telling Tales). We will finish by reading and thinking through Zadie Smith’s new play, The Wife of Willesden. Course assignments will include presentations, discussion, and the possibility of your own creative adaptation.

Term 1
Thu   2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Reimagining Jane Eyre and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Why is Jane Eyre one of the most popular English novels ever written, inspiring successive generations of authors and artists of every description? How did Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland become a culture-text, a text that occupies such a prominent place in the popular imagination that it is collectively known and “remembered” even when the original work has never been read?

We will attempt to answer these and other questions of cultural production in our discussions of the novels and some of their adaptations and reimaginings. We will also explore the ideological assumptions – with respect to gender, race, class, sexuality, mental and physical ability, the environment, ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, etc. – implicit in the original works and in their reimaginings, and in our (and the Victorians’) readings of them.

Our discussions will be wide-ranging: from Jean Rhys’s famous Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea to Paula Rego’s lithographs, Sujata Bhatt’s Rego poems, Sally Cookson’s devised stage production, and Patricia Park’s Re Jane (described by Park as “updating Jane Eyre to contemporary New York and the world of organic produce and identity politics”); from Walt Disney’s 1951 Alice in Wonderland, which continues to define Carroll’s novel in the popular imagination, to Salvador Dalí’s art edition, Damon Albarn and Moira Buffini’s musical wonder.land, Tara Bryan’s tunnel book Down the Rabbit Hole, and the “Alice industry.”

You will be required to have read Jane Eyre in its entirety before our September 14th class. Please begin reading before our course begins.

Our reading and viewing list will include: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World's Classics); Jane Eyre, devised by the Company and directed by Sally Cookson, 2015 (Drama Online, UBC Library); Patricia Park, Re Jane (Penguin); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview); Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney, 1951 (UBC Library); Alice in Wonderland, directed by Jonathan Miller, 1966 (Library Online Course Reserves, Canvas (only available during term)); wonder.land, directed by Rufus Norris, lyrics and text by Moira Buffini, music by Damon Albarn, 2015 (Drama Online, UBC Library).

Term 1
Fri  12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Tudor Revivals

Our seminar takes its title from a style of architecture that was popular in late-nineteenth-century Britain and its colonies. Sometimes called “mock Tudor,” this style is steeped in the comforts of nostalgia; as such, it proves an historical fiction responding to cultural anxieties about mass industrialization and empire. In this seminar we shall activate the name of this architectural style, examples of which are still locatable in Vancouver and Victoria, to think about historical fictions that have been set in Tudor times. In their own ways, each of these texts is a “Tudor Revival” that is processing contemporary aesthetics and the political and racial economies of empire. Each student will submit weekly discussion questions, lead a seminar presentation, and submit a final essay.

We’ll begin with William Morris’s utopian novel News from Nowhere, since Morris is so closely aligned with the architectural style. From there, we’ll explore historical fictions about Tudor England in the Shakespearean collaboration Henry VI, Part 1, Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (likely the tv adaptation), E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia, C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake mystery series, and one of the many films about Queen Elizabeth I. We’ll pair each text with literary and visual artefact from the sixteenth century.

Term 2
Mon  10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Course description not yet available.

Term 2
Wed  2:00 PM- 4:00 PM

Twenty-First Century U.S. Fiction

This seminar will examine U.S. fiction (novels and short story collections) of the first twenty years of the twenty-first century. Topics will include postmodernism and its putative end; new forms of experimentation such as autofiction; 9/11, its aftermath, and the U.S.’s place in geopolitics; and neoliberal economics as the dominant logic of contemporary capitalism. Students will write a seminar paper based in close-reading, a final research essay, and some online posts, as well as lead and participate in discussion. Texts will include the following and possibly a few others: David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion (2004) (selected stories); Toni Morrison’s Love (2003); Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers (2013); Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014); short stories by John Edgar Wideman; and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019).

Term 2
Thu  10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Being together in the maritime world, 1790s-1850s

 At the beginning of the age of British imperial expansion, as writers imagined, described, and inventoried what they saw as colonizable or claimed as colonized spaces, they simultaneously confronted a new understanding of oceans: less as what William Wordsworth had called “the barrier flood” than as a medium connecting the world’s land masses and, by extension, its peoples. British writers often responded to the colonizing projects of their rulers and fellow citizens with anxious investigation and rumination over Britain’s porousness, its vulnerability to arrivals of people, illnesses, and emotions from abroad: in short, with defensive fantasy, or what psychoanalysts call projection. In this seminar, we will read 2-3 exemplary poetic imaginings of the unified autonomous individual of British Romantic poetry as one unstable, uncertain expression of these new understandings of being together, formulated in maritime imperial contexts in defensive response to British colonial activity. We’ll read excerpts from writings by major colonizers, e.g. James Cook, William Jones, Mungo Park, Samuel Hearne, or William H. Keating, and the engineer and economic historian Richard Phillips (who sought to position Britain as a future rival to the world’s oldest and richest empire, China) as resources for British imaginings of a maritime empire. We will take up 2-3 texts that respond to, resist, critique, and/ or set out alternatives to these models and understandings of imperial selfhood. We’ll examine critical and competitor British understandings of community or polity in protests for political reform, labour protest, and abolitionist activity (what we might think of as community-building from below.) And we’ll consider alternative models of being together in the world from Indigenous Nations, e.g. Haudenosaunee democratic traditions and the Two Row Wampum Treaty and Nuu-chah-nulth, especially Mowachaht, cosmology, kinship, and diplomacy.

Term 1
Tue  10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Indigenous Non-fiction

Why, how and what do Indigenous writers create when they produce non-fiction works? How does engaging Indigenous non-fiction provide opportunities to understand these genres, these writers and the contexts from which they come? With a focus on six recent books from very different Indigenous, colonial and political contexts, in this course we will engage with longstanding conversations about Indigenous non-fiction as we seek to understand, as Osage literary scholar Robert Warrior puts it, “the unrecognized centrality of nonfiction writing” to Indigenous literary, political and social worlds. Over the term we will weave together these six primary texts, a range of critical work, and the perspectives and training we bring with us into the class.

• Aguon – No Country for Eight Spot Butterflies
• Buchanan – Te Motunui Epa
• Miranda – Bad Indians
• Simpson & Maynard - Rehearsals For Living
• Washout & Warburton - Shapes of Native Nonfiction
• Watego – Another Day in the Colony

Term 1
Wed  10:00 AM - 12:00 PM

In this course we’ll read a variety of lyric poems, usually about two or three per class. Some of these poems come from the sixteenth century; some from the twenty-first century; some from the centuries in between.  We’ll investigate to what extent a poem can be about anything besides itself. In other words, does a lyric poem represent an emotional state, a landscape, a work of art, or any other of the ostensible subjects of lyric poetry, or does it chiefly (or most interestingly?) represent its own writing, its own workings as a text?

Most of the poems will be available online through the library. In cases, where the library doesn’t have copies of the poems I’ll make them available from my own copies.

Term 1
Mon  1:00 PM- 3:00 PM

The Western Front, 1914-18: International Retrospectives

Neither will they understand--that will not be all my fault.  ---Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928)

In “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” (1915), written while two of his sons were serving in the Austrian army during the First World War, with a third son soon to volunteer, Sigmund Freud offered this astonishingly objective description of the escalating world war:

Not only is it more bloody and more destructive than any war of other days,
because of the enormously increased perfection of weapons of attack and defence;
it is at least as cruel, as embittered, as implacable as any that has preceded it. It
disregards all the restrictions known as International Law, which in peace-time
the states had bound themselves to observe; it ignores the prerogatives of the
wounded and the medical service, the distinction between civil and military
sections of the population, the claims of private property. It tramples in blind fury
on all that comes in its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace
among men after it is over. It cuts all the common bonds between the contending
peoples, and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any
renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come.

Reflecting, moreover, on the scene of mass industrialized killing and Europe's dead millions from a post-World War II, post-holocaust, post-atom-bomb perspective, one comes to understand why George Kennan described the First World War as “the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. The visceral and visual perspectives of infantry soldiers, aviators, and military hospital nurses may enable us to grasp something of the war's terrible reality. Our readings will include eye-witness accounts from the zone of war by French, German, British, Canadian, and American participants. A warning: the course readings include graphic descriptions of extreme violence--killing, death, wounds, mutilation, corpses, soul injury--along with countless heart-rending accounts of young people "doomed to a short life" (The Iliad).

Students will give a 30-minute presentation, write a three-page essay (to be circulated in advance and read aloud), do a ten-minute informal reading ("open the book, read something aloud, formulate a question or observation"), and write a final essay.

Readings will include the following:

• Ellen La Motte, The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse (1916)
• Henri Barbusse, Under Fire (1916)
• William ("Billy") A. Bishop, Winged Warfare (1918)
• Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (1920)
• Hervey Allen, Toward the Flame (1926)
• Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (1928)
• Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1928)
• Mary Borden, The Forbidden Zone (1929)
• Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That (1929)
• Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930)

Suggested Preliminary and Contextual Reading:

• W.E.B. Du Bois, "White Imperialism" (1914)
• Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" (1915)
• B.H. Liddell Hart, The Real War 1914-1918 (1930)
• B.H. Liddell Hart, World War I in Outline (1936)
• Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (1962)
• Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 (2015)

Term 2
Thu  2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Course description is not yet available.

Term 2
Tue  2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Black Miscellanea: Black Experiments in Form

As Katherine McKittrick writes, Black miscellanea, “signal[s] an experiment in coming to know black livingness without producing and reproducing an intellectual economy that is oversaturated with racial violence.” To that end, this course takes up considerations of Black experimental thought, methods, and forms to consider the question of Black life in the contemporary moment.

Holding the experimental at the forefront of our thought, this course will sojourn with the work of Black theorists, activists, and artists that reimagine “a way of thinking the space/time of politics for those deemed disposable or socially dead within the contexts of heteropatriarchy and white supremacy” (Audre Lorde), attending to questions of the disjunctive, the genre flail, the palimpsestic, the miscellaneous, and so forth. For example, we will consider how novelistic, poetic, and critical writings join with the sonic, the spoken, the virtual, and the conceptual performance pieces to alchemize Black life.

Our explorations will entail a critical interrogation of the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class, with particular interest in how those social formations correspond and diverge. As part of this course, we will take a heterogenous and expansive definition of theory and include creative productions, engaging with myriad forms of texts including video games, poetry, performance art, visual art, and so forth. Students may also produce projects reflecting these forms (ex. collages, podcast episodes, short films, etc.)   

Term 2
Wed   2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Contemporary Chaucers

In the first few weeks we will read a number of the most important and influential Canterbury Tales in a modern English translation. One focus of our discussion will be the range of sources and traditions, from Europe and beyond, that informed Chaucer’s writing of the Tales. We will then consider some of the best-known modern and contemporary adaptations, focusing on particular pilgrims and tales (the Miller, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner) and areas (including the African diaspora in Britain, America, and the Caribbean). Works we read together may include, for example, Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales; Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden; Marilyn Nelson, The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems; Kim Zarins, Sometimes We Tell the Truth; one or more collections of Refugee Tales by various writers. Class members will develop projects exploring the many ways that Chaucer is represented in the 20^th-21^st centuries: adaptation in fiction, including for children and young adults, and in poetry; stage, film, animation; translation; illustration; various kinds of allusion such as dramatic monologues based in Chaucer’s work and life. Each class member will give a presentation; there will be opportunities to present on Chaucer and his contexts, and on contemporary responses to his work.

Research in English Studies
Term 1
Thursday 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Required of all graduate students in the M.A. program. Pass/Fail.

This course will introduce new MA students in the Department of English Language and Literatures to graduate-level research skills and professional practices. Meetings will include a variety of guest presentations, workshops, and library visits. Sessions will focus on such topics as archival research, digital tools, applying for grants, writing seminar papers and conference proposals, and submitting articles for publications.

Research in English Studies
Term 1
Thursday 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Required of all graduate students in the PhD program. Pass/Fail.

Studies in Bibliography
Term 1
Mondays 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM

This is a hands-on course in scholarly editing and publishing, in which we will work collaboratively across the term on a complete edition of Hobomok, the 1824 romance by American human rights campaigner Lydia Maria Child. The edition is under contract for 2025 publication by Broadview Press, and we will also develop some additional material for possible inclusion in the online resources for the Broadview Anthology of American Literature.

We will work on the text itself (cruxes, textual editing principles), on the identification and selection of historical appendices and illustrations, and on the critical introduction, footnotes, headnotes and contextual essays for a classroom edition of this complex fictionalization: in the (historical) Plymouth Colony, a (fictional) woman resists Puritan constraint and later marries Hobomok, a (historical) Pokanoket pniese and advisor to the Wampanoag sachem Massasoit. Child also published actively in the anti-slavery movement, and the course includes opportunities to work on her abolitionist writings. Students who complete the course will be named on the acknowledgements page in the published edition, and there will be an additional published teaching resource to which student-editors may be able to contribute.

This course will make use of scholarship on critical editing; on creating materials for decolonizing pedagogies; on the novel and its author; on women’s responses to Puritan patriarchies, romance as resistance, and the implications of colonial imaginings of Black and Indigenous lives by settler women; and on the historical Hobomok and his communities’ nuanced resistance to colonial violence and settler encroachment.

Course work will include one article-length essay (focused on either original scholarship or critical scholarly pedagogy), reviews of secondary readings (with short presentation), and several short researched editorial contributions (annotations, appendices, headnotes, illustrations).

Studies in Fiction
Term 2
Fridays 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM

In this seminar, we will explore Victorian fiction’s fascination with imagined futures, alternate histories, and wonderful inventions. The genre of scientific romance (later, science fiction) fully emerged in the period; utopian and dystopian fiction became popular; literature by leading authors envisioned fantastic new technologies, alternative cultures, and alien lifeforms. In recent years, Victorian criticism has come to appreciate that the non-realist fiction that was once critically undervalued is central to the literary culture of the period. The revaluation of these texts has been driven largely by a shift toward interdisciplinary modes of literary criticism. Nineteenth-century speculative fictions draw on scientific, psychological, biomedical, and political ideas that emerged in and transformed nineteenth-century culture. The literary texts we will read pose questions about gender, race, colonialism, globalization, industrialism, technological progress, political and social relations, and the nature of the human. Examining the fiction’s literary and cultural contexts, we will discuss such topics as automata and the boundaries between humans and machines, science fiction’s entanglement with colonialism, new conceptions of time and space, environmental concerns and apocalypse, and imagined evolutionary developments of body and mind.

Assignments and Other Requirements:

• Seminar paper (roughly 20 pages)
• Presentation (roughly 25 minutes)
• Three sets of informal questions/comments on the readings

Texts will include:

• Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Coming Race
• Samuel Butler, Erewhon
• George Eliot, “The Lifted Veil” and “Shadows of the Coming Race”
• Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, “Sultana’s Dream”
• Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)
• H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
• Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Tomorrow’s Eve
• Short fiction by Rudyard Kipling, Margaret Oliphant, Grant Allen, Israel Zangwill, Elizabeth Corbett, Edward Bellamy

Selections from:

• Mary Gibson, ed. Science Fiction in Colonial India
• Frederic Jameson, “Progress or Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future”?
• Iwan Rhys Morus, “Looking into the Future: The Telectroscope That Wasn’t There”
• Louis Chude Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics

Studies in Poetry
Term 2
Mondays 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Course details to follow.

Linguistic Studies of Contemporary English
Term 1
Thursdays 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Narrative meaning relies essentially on conceptualization of viewpoint. In this course, we will study theories of viewpoint proposed within cognitive linguistics and poetics, also adding some of the analytical tools used to study conceptual frames, mental spaces and blending, and multimodal interaction. The goal is to build an understanding of how viewpoint effects, even if observed in different modes of communication, rely on similar conceptualizations. We will apply these theories to a range of phenomena where narrative meaning emerges, seeking a better explanation of the mechanisms which prompt stories to help us interpret creative representations of situations.

We will first study the basics of current approaches to discourse viewpoint and narrative viewpoint, to then consider a range of examples from that perspective. Our readings, examples, and discussions will focus on a wide range of artifacts: novels, plays, films, graphic novels, video games, cartoons, advertisements, and, quite importantly, internet memes.

Among more theoretical problems related to narratives, we will address deictic meaning, forms of Speech and Thought Representation (including representation of experience), role of figuration, the nature of embodiment, sequentiality and causation, construction of identity, and the role of images in contemporary discourse.

Students will familiarize themselves with the methodologies and use the readings (scholarly articles and chapters) and in-class discussions to develop analytical skills that they would then use in their final project on relevant examples of their choice. All the readings will be available online via Canvas/UBC Library website.

Studies in Rhetoric
Term 2
Fridays 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

While rhetorical studies has long engaged disability on issues of access and accessibility, scholars such as Tara Wood, Jay Dolmage, Margaret Price, and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson (2014) have urged the field to “move beyond mere lists and individual accommodations.” This seminar sets out to explore that “beyond,” teasing out the conflicts and potentials embedded at the intersection of disability, rhetoric, and activism. Over the course of the semester, we will ask two, interanimating questions: in what ways can we write about, theorize, and teach disability rhetorically? And in what ways might experiences of disability “crip” our understanding of rhetoric and rhetorical theory?

To further complicate these questions, our readings will insist that we adopt an intersectional lens, one that accounts for the ways both disability and sexuality are always already racialized, gendered, and classed. By the end of the course, you will come away with a thorough understanding of both the scope and the stakes of crip activism. Whether you intend to take up disability as the primary subject of your research or as a critical methodology to enrich your perspective on another topic, you’ll become aware of the centrality of disability, of its looming presence in rhetorical studies. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson puts it (2016), “Disability is everywhere once you start noticing it.”

Importantly, disability is an embodied experience (rather than a purely theoretical exercise), which means our readings will include a combination of genres, such as memoir, fiction, theory, and graphic literature, that speak to disability’s materiality. The course assignments, too, will demand a kind of engagement with the world of disability that exceeds traditional library research and a final paper. These assignments ask you to take up Garland-Thomson’s call to “start noticing” disability in your scholarship, service, and lives outside of school. Noticing disability is a rhetorical task because it involves rescripting the discourses that we use to name and address bodymind difference. Indeed, this seminar sits delicately on the border of theory and praxis, urging us to take on a scholar-teacher-activist model of professionalism that reimagines disability and rhetoric in all aspects of our lives. As this seminar will make clear, studying crip rhetorics requires a commitment to fighting for disability liberation.

Middle English Studies
Term 2
Wednesdays 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

The European Middle Ages have, from their very beginning, been called forth into the world through acts of dreaming. From Shakespeare's history play cycles to Tennyson's Idylls, Tolkien's medieval world-making to 2021's Capitol riot Viking Shaman, acts of medieval re-creation punctuate the histories of the west, conjuring forth a Middle Ages manifold in form and ideological content. Identity politics, and the question of who owns the past - and to what purposes this past is deployed - are concerns that lie at the heart of this course.

This course will examine the "Middle Ages" as a cultural phenomenon, tracing the continually reimagined idea of the medieval from its origins in the Early Modern through to its continual reinvention in early twenty-first century media. We will examine texts that track the slippery medieval through its long and varied history, taking in genres as diverse as theatre, poetry, the novel, film and TV, and the recent turn to the immersive digital medieval.

Studies in the Renaissance
Term 2
Tuesdays 9:30 PM - 12:30 PM

In 2021, UBC acquired a copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio.  Published in 1623, the book is the first printing for nearly half of Shakespeare’s plays. Since there are no surviving manuscripts of any of Shakespeare’s works, 18 plays, including Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, The Tempest and Twelfth Night, are known to us today only because they were first published in the Folio. The recent UBC acquisition, along with the fact that 2023 marks the 400^th anniversary of the Folio’s publication, provides the occasion for this course.

Our seminar will take the First Folio as its object of study. All of our encounters with this book will be mediated by an interrogation of its status as both a luxury commodity to be collected and cultural property to be protected. We will query where the book’s value comes from and question the assumption that the volume is imbued with the aura of Shakespeare himself. We will think about the book’s role in the settling of North America – that is how it became what scholar Jyotsna Singh has described, as “a key signifier within colonial discourse.” We will also think about the ways in which the Folio, as an artifact from a world distant from our own, penned by a figure that continues to tower over our collective imagination, provides an occasion for UBC students and faculty, living and working on the unceded lands of the Coast Salish people, to rethink our understanding of literary and cultural history.

We will have limited access to the UBC copy at Rare Books and Special Collections, so we will take these opportunities to explore the things that make it unique. We will look for markers of use and readership and we will investigate the book’s previous owners. We will also look at how UBC is promoting this notable acquisition and we will consider the implications of our library’s policy around who is and is not given access to it.

In class, students will explore the story of the Folio’s printing (the gathering of the plays as well as how the book was physically printed) and explore the volume’s idiosyncrasies. Students will have the opportunity to learn about about the printing of dramatic and literary works in early modern period and they will explore the value of digitization projects in our own period. Students will also spend some time with the Folio plays themselves in order to think about what they add to the Shakespearean canon. We will consider the resources the Folio provides for theatre practitioners and we will ponder why it is that actors are particularly drawn to this book.

Reading for this course will include 3-4 plays and a selection of secondary material. Evaluation will include a seminar presentation and a research project. Participation will be evaluated and in person attendance will be mandatory

Students participating in this seminar may have the opportunity to attend a symposium on the First Folio scheduled for the Fall of 2023.

Studies in the Seventeenth Century
Term 1
Wednesdays 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Woman-identified writers of the English Renaissance in many fascinating ways both disturb and amplify the public discourses of their eras.  They write into emergent Reformed nationalism and empire, speak for and against class hierarchies, create and subvert a politics of dissent, and reimagine authority.  These writers thus intervene in the major narratives of this century: the Protestant Reformation; English nation- and empire-building; civil and regional wars--as they also build new literary alliances, new communities of readers, and new genres.  This seminar will encounter a series of major English women writers from 1580-1680 and explore how they speak into their publics.

Perspectives:

This course will implicitly challenge Habermas’ history of an emergent public sphere: whose politics, which publics?

We will use queer theory historians to study the roles of gender-identity and sexuality in these writers and in this era.

We will deploy scholarship on early English racialization to analyze the emergent colonialism and nationalism in which these writers operate.

Authors and Issues

• Mary Sidney Herbert (Psalms & dedicatory poems): scriptural nationalism
• Amelia Lanyer (Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum): women’s alliances & class-politics
• Mary Wroth (Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; Urania): desire, nostalgia, eco-politics
• Katherine Philips (Collected Poems; Letters): Royalist politics & female alliances
• Elizabeth Cary, Tragedy of Mariam: White Feminism & marriage-policy
• Margaret Cavendish, Convent of Pleasure: female pleasures, feminine communities
• Mary Rowlandson (Sovereignty and Goodness of God): captivity narratives, early settler colonization
• Margaret Fell (Women’s Speaking Justified): Quakers, revolution, & women’s spiritual voices

Course-Organization: We will all be responsible for our collective learning in every class, since that’s how a seminar works.  Graduate courses are also professional training grounds in which you become practiced in scholarly genres and modes.  All of the scaffolded course-work (article reviews, a presentation, a research project, weekly discussions) will facilitate our community of learning and your own growing professional skills.

Studies in the Victorian Period
Term 1
Mondays 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

This seminar offers students a deep dive into the varied literary career and complex cultural afterlife of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), the late-Victorian writer and personality. Although Wilde is perhaps best known as a playwright, he also published in multiple genres, including poetry, fiction, criticism, and fairy tales. Wilde was also a journalist, public speaker, and one of the inaugural figures in the modern phenomenon we now call celebrity culture. He reveled in paradox and contradiction: an Irish nationalist who adored Queen Victoria, Wilde was a self-proclaimed Socialist and Feminist who nevertheless gloried in his elite access to prestige and privilege. Wilde’s trials and subsequent imprisonment for “gross indecency” in 1895 remain a turning point in legal and literary history; those events also had, and continue to have, an indelible impact in shaping our understanding of queer identity and politics. In this course, we will consider Wilde’s writing and life by reading texts by him, about him, and even those erroneously attributed to him with an eye to the shifting contours of his reception and reputation. Students will also have an opportunity to work directly with rare and unique editions of Wilde’s writings at UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections.

WARNING: one of our texts (Teleny) is pornographic.

Main texts:

• Anon., Teleny, or, the Reverse of the Medal (selections)
• F. Bloxam, “The Priest and the Acolyte” (Canvas)
• Alfred Douglas, “Two Loves” and “The Dead Poet”
• Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (Harper Perennial)
• Oscar Wilde,  The Major Works (Oxford)
• Salome (Illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley)
• The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose (Penguin)
• “The English Renaissance” and “The House Beautiful” (Canvas)Our readings will also include the latest critical and theoretical developments in Wilde Studies.

Studies in the Twentieth Century
Term 1
Tuesdays 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Description by  Marlene Briggs

Virginia Woolf, War, and Post-Conflict Studies: From the First World War to the War in Ukraine

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century, lived in a period punctuated by devastating international conflicts, including the First World War (1914-1918), the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), and the Second World War (1939-1945). As a member of the Bloomsbury Group, she associated with influential artists and intellectuals such as J. M. Keynes and Leonard Woolf, who intervened in public debates on the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and the League of Nations (1920-1946), respectively. For her part, Woolf reflected on the causes and effects of hostilities in occasional writings, a polemical essay, experimental novels, and late fictions. Since the publication of the signal collection Virginia Woolf and War (1991), scholars have paid increasing attention to this pivotal concern in her oeuvre. We revisit Woolf’s writings on total war and the rise of fascism in a time of climate emergency marked by the return of conventional military tactics and right-wing populist leaders. To what extent do Woolf’s innovative texts illuminate transhistorical problems in studies of war ranging from the First World War to the War in Ukraine? Conversely, how do her investigations of conflict expose ethicopolitical dilemmas–inequities, injuries, displacements, and divisions–particular to her era?

We begin with timely theoretical interventions in war and post-conflict studies before turning to sociopolitical perspectives on the First World War and its aftermath by Woolf’s contemporaries (including Hogarth Press [1917-1946] editions in UBC Rare Books and Special Collections). In the next section, we grapple with key statements on militarism and pacifism in Woolf criticism prior to our deliberations on her occasional essays (ca. 1915-1940) and Three Guineas (1938). The third unit features prominent research on Woolf’s experimental fictions before we approach Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Similarly, we address noted critical essays on Woolf’s late novels in the fourth part of the seminar before we interpret The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941). In the concluding section, we gauge the impacts of twenty-first century wars and conflicts in Woolf studies and we consider the limits and possibilities of post-conflict paradigms. Assignments may include a reading journal; a seminar presentation; a project proposal; and a final essay. In summary, this seminar orients students to multidisciplinary research on organized violence; promotes familiarity with diverse texts in Woolf’s oeuvre; fosters critical fluency in Woolf scholarship; and invites speculation on modes of theorizing war.

Studies in American Literature to 1890
Term 2
Wednesdays 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

Most of us have had the experience of paying good money so we can sit in a theatre, watch a film, and be terrified.  What reward or pleasure is there in being artificially afraid? In this course we will investigate the genre of “terror,” partly by reading gothic materials themselves and partly by looking at a history of explanations of how the gothic works.  Our focus in terms of primary texts will be on memorable gothic tales produced by nineteenth and twentieth-century US writers and filmmakers. Our focus in terms of explanatory models will be, first, on psychoanalytic and anthropological models that relate the gothic to the subject’s or the culture’s repressed or unconscious life; and, second, on constructivist and critical race theory models that see the gothic as a political structure.  In this sense the course will look not just at a certain strand of the gothic itself but also at a rough map of twentieth and twentieth-first-century theorizations of the gothic. Fictional texts to be studied include: the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, H.P. Lovecraft, Henry James, and the poems of Emily Dickinson. Films to be studied include: George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Ridley Scott’s Alien, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Robert Eggers’ The VVitch, Jordan Peele’s Us, and Ari Aster’s Hereditary. We will be reading essays from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Žižek, Silvia Federici, Michel Foucault, Alexander G. Weheliye, and Christina Sharpe.

Studies in American Literature Since 1890
Term 1
Thursdays 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

The seminar will focus on three U.S. writers: Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, and Mary McCarthy. These writers are most often associated with the aesthetics and politics of early- and mid-centiury modernism, but in this course we will think about their writing as it participates in that earlier, somewhat outré literary formation known as naturalism. With its origins in the work of the French writer Emile Zola and its uptake in the American scene by Frank Norris and others, naturalism is often characterized as an attempt to realize nineteenth-century materialist, scientific theories (of heredity and political economy, for example) in literary form. And while it bears some resemblance to nineteenth-century realism, naturalism's commitment to obscure forces that determine subjectivity and behaviour make it continuous with twentieth-century aesthetics often associated with modernism

In this seminar we will ask questions that disturb any easy periodizations of literary practices. What role do naturalist formations play in twentieth-century writing that takes up these conventions in the critical, experimental modalities that we associate with modernism? What happens to gender, sexuality, race, class, and other categories when naturalizing tendencies come into relation to specific historical and political exigencies (such as changing institutions of gender and sexuality, racial segregation and protest, radical worker movements and anti-Communism)? What is there to be learned from a "weak theoretical" approach to literary writing (to cite Paul Saint-Amour citing Silvan Tomkins) that approaches these writers (and others) with close attention to phenomenologies of reading? Methodologically, this seminar offers a syncretic mix of literary and cultural history, American studies, modernist studies, and affect theory.

In addition to the seminar's focus on Stein, Wright, and McCarthy, authors may include: Emile Zola, Frank Norris, W.E.B Du Bois, Mina Loy, Jesse Fausset, Nella Larsen, Hannah Arendt, and others, and selections from relevant secondary work by Mark Seltzer, Sianne Ngai, Christina Sharpe, Mark Goble, and others.

Course currently under construction.

Studies in Canadian Literature
Term 1
Fridays 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

“Improvisation,” says the American historian Robin D. G. Kelley, “is the most important tool you have to navigate both the catastrophe we’re facing and the counter-planning needed to move beyond that catastrophe.” “As a mode of being in the world,” write Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble and George Lipsitz in The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (2013), “improvisation shows us that there are other ways of doing things, that social change is possible, that another world is possible.” The recent decade has witnessed the emergence (at conjunctions of Literary and Performance Studies, of Cultural Studies and Media Theory) of a vitally Canadian version of Critical Studies in Improvisation, in socially-engaged academic, artistic, and community contexts across North America and around the world. While improvisation is commonly associated with theatre, comedy and jazz, study has expanded to include the politics of protest and community formation, as well as the temporality and historicity of many forms of text and representation. This seminar will offer encounters with significant Canadian bodies of creative and co-creative work, enacted through the dynamic critical framework of Critical Studies in Improvisation. We will use the first four weeks of the seminar to begin to develop both theory and method around the study of improvisation, as a form of practice-based research and as a present-tense modality of “doing the work,” including such key concepts as attendance, close listening, risk, care, accompaniment, reciprocity and disruption; this stage of the work will involve addressing and interrogating tactics of decolonial unsettling that are changing how we understand the literary, cultural and media landscape of the country. In addition to key examples of improvisatory technique in fiction, poetry, song, theatre and film by, possibly among others, Michael Snow, Jordan Abel, Karen Solie, Michel and Jeannette Lambert, Lorna Goodison, George Elliott Clarke, The Weather Station, Dylan Robinson, François Houle, Cadence Weapon, Pierre Hébert, Esi Edugyan, and Michael Ondaatje, students in the seminar will be invited to bring in samples of current creative work in Canada that engages their interest. The second half of the seminar will involve two-week case studies of works by four crucial figures in contemporary Canadian arts: Dionne Brand, Don McKay, Fred Wah, and Alanis Obomsawin. We will take time to investigate and to navigate the imaginative potentials that their poetry, prose and film enact. In what ways do they unsettle Canada, but also present possibilities for imagining other kinds of community?

Studies in Commonwealth/Post-colonial Literatures
Term 2
Thursdays 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM

“Development”—and its myriad cognates, including “underdevelopment,” “uneven development,” “developing nations,” “human development index” and so forth—has been the central paradigm framing colonial and postcolonial geopolitical and economic structures over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The aim of this seminar is twofold: first, we will trace the history and evolution of the term “development,” the ways it has been differently envisioned and defined; its historical impact on colonial, postcolonial, and international forms of governance; and its imbrication with other political discourses like human rights and gender equality. Second, the course will read twentieth- and twenty-first century colonial, postcolonial, and world Anglophone fiction to see how various novelistic forms, especially the Bildungsroman—the quintessential narrative of development—adapt themselves to different socio-historical conditions of development and intervene in broader political debates.

Primary texts may include Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’O, Petals of Blood, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms. Secondary readings will be drawn from an intersection of humanities and social sciences scholarship (in the field of development studies), including work by Gilbert Rist, James Ferguson, Frederick Cooper, Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Brian Larkin, Michael Rubenstein, Martha Nussbaum, and Amartya Sen.

Studies in Literary Movements
Term 2
Tuesdays 1:30 PM - 4:30 PM

In this course we will ask: what does it mean to read, theorize and teach Indigenous texts here where a continent meets an ocean? Bringing together key critical and creative Indigenous texts from the Western edge of this continent and from the vast Pacific region, we will consider critical foundations for our conversation, engage ocean-centered approaches to literary texts and the urgency of the climate crisis as it affects the Pacific, and trace several textual and structural sites in which ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Pacific’ interact.

Studies in Literary Theory
Term 1
Tuesdays 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

This class is an opportunity for intensive study in one of the most promising areas of development in Trans Studies today: a field aptly described by Elle O’Rourke and Jules Gleeson as “Transgender Marxism.”  The course will explore the intersection of Marxist thought and struggles around gender and sexuality, and will address and introduce classic areas in Marxist analysis - such as production/reproduction, the commodity-form, and fetishism -  as well as more vanguard areas of the field - such as metabolic rift theory and eco-socialism - alongside major LGBTQIA movements, movements for racial justice, sex workers’ rights, industrial labor and workplace struggles, health activism, land struggles, mutual aid, and immigrant rights. Throughout, we will center a meta-methodological question that comes directly from a Transgender Marxist praxis itself: why is it that much of the most important and impactful work in trans theory and thought is being produced outside of academia proper? We will take seriously and discuss the historical conditions for this situation, and the majority of our materials and guest lectures will be drawn from non-academic or para-academic scholars and thinkers. Authors may include theorists, poets, activists, and artists such as Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O’Brien, Aren Aizura, Tithi Bhattacharya, Lou Cornum, Treva Ellison, Leslie Feinberg, Jules Gill-Peterson, Jules Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, Sophie Lewis, Max Liboiron, Petrus Liu, Nat Raha, Dean Spade, and C. Riley Snorton. 

Studies in Literary Theory
Term 2
Thursdays 2:30 PM - 5:30 PM

This seminar explores the relationship between race, capitalism, and information technologies. By following these links, we attend to historical and contemporary racial formations and/as “new” technologies—including settler colonial figurations of enslaved and indentured labour that construct borders around the human, the nonhuman, and the machinic; techno-Orientalist discourses in the information age; border surveillance and computation; and the logics of algorithms in social and political practices. The seminar also takes up theories of race, gender, and sexuality as they pertain to new media performance, affect, and labour. With a particular focus on Asian North American and new media studies, we will read critical theory across different fields and engage a variety of texts, including visual art, film, literature, music, and digital media.

Topics in Science and Technology Studies
Term 1
Wednesdays 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
"Media & Misinformation: The History of Truth from Pseudoscience to Propaganda"
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Media and Misinformation: The History of Truth from Pseudoscience to Propaganda

Information and propaganda, science and truth, planetary crises and democratic responses are inter-dependent. The lives of people and the planet will depend on our ability to communicate accurately and effectively. Media Studies, traditionally the locus for the study of communication technologies, has, by necessity, expanded its field to engage with disciplines such as Science and Technology Studies, Information Studies, Infrastructure and Network analysis, as well as with established disciplines such as History, Geography, and English. This new iteration of Media Studies has now become the most consequential place—inside and outside the academy—for a new critical, interdisciplinary vocabulary to take effect.

This course offers a design for a new kind of literacy. The future world citizen must be equally proficient in analyzing technical, historical, and narrative forms. Yet our disciplines parse, prioritize, and rank these forms of representation, creating students highly skilled in one or two but not across the diverse forms in which “truth” and “information” come packaged today. The future of education is interdisciplinary, because our crises are inter-connected, and because transdisciplinary citizens are needed to address planetary and political challenges. This course seeks to create a set of tools that will enable critique at the intersection of the history of truth and the future of citizenship.

Studies in Environmental Humanities
Term 1
Fridays 9:30 AM - 12:30 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 profoundly 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 both of 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, 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 and literary arts are playing in denaturalizing settler-capitalism by envisioning reciprocal land relations and more environmentally just futures. We will begin by examining 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, climate change), adopting an expansive sense of the “literary” in diverse genres and representational forms.

Readings:

We’ll be localizing our approach to the diffuse field of 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 weekly 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, Fred Wah, Kyle Powys Whyte, Patrick Wolfe, rita wong, Kathryn Yusoff, Zacharias Kunuk.