The Language of Memes: Patterns of Meaning Emergence Across Image and Text

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
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Irony and Serious Humour in Multicultural Writing and Film

As cultural and literary devices, irony and humour are similar in that they often involve language or forms of expression that appear to mean something other than what they say. This surprising lack of commitment to meaning is part of what makes irony and humour funny—and thus unserious by definition. It’s only a joke, after all. Yet ironic double meaning and comic incongruity are also highly effective when it comes to raising difficult issues or potentially distressing and embarrassing subject matter. Ironically, it is the unseriousness of humour that seems most to recommend it as a literary and cultural technique for addressing serious issues.

This course proposes to take a serious look at how different forms of irony and humour operate in the creative work of a number of (mostly) contemporary Indigenous, Black, and multicultural authors. It inquires into how these authors use ironic and comic modes of address and representation to elude and transgress dominant social norms around class, gender, race, sexuality, and identity. Who or what is the “butt” or object of humour in the work of these short story writers, poets, and film makers? Are their jokes and ironic characterizations primarily instances of “laughing at,” or do they also invite readers to consolidate group identity and fellow feeling by means of “laughing with?” Do the texts use comic ambiguity and irony to “bribe” readers with feelings of comic enjoyment, or is the goal rather to generate ridicule, scorn, and displeasure. Most importantly, are there instances in which these authors use humour to perform more overtly serious work, such as political resistance, opposition, and critique?

The course syllabus is to comprise work by some or all of the following authors, poets, and directors: Sherman Alexie (Spokane), Marie Annharte Baker (Anishinaabe), Wanda Coleman, Linh Dinh, Chester Himes, Thomas King (Cherokee), Ha Jin, Spike Lee, Adrian Louis (Lovelock Paiute), K. Silem Mohammad, Trevor Noah, and John Yau. Many of the texts are quite short, and we are watching at least one film (in lieu of reading a novel).

TERM 1
TTh, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

We will post the course description as it becomes available.

TERM 2
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Narrating Realities

What does it mean to “represent” a real-world fact, experience, or belief in fiction? What happens to that “real” thing once it becomes part of a story? Why do we use stories — instead of more clearly factual modes of communication — to process and communicate our perceptions and experiences of reality? What are the signals we use to differentiate fact from fiction in the first place? If we accept that the lines between story and reality are blurry, how can fiction be used to propose alternative realities, or challenge the “truths” and perceptions of this one?

This course will analyze themes of fictional reality in texts from authors including Jorge Luis Borges, Lana and Lilly Wachowski, and Tim O’Brien. We will particularly focus on texts by racially marginalized authors in North America, including Eden Robinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, who have used fiction as a space in which to challenge the realities asserted by colonizer knowledge and stories. We will encounter texts in various formal genres — a novel, short fiction, poetry, a film — and ask how approaches to narrating reality mark the differences between these genres.

Texts will include Robinson's Monkey Beach (Vintage, 2000), O’Brien’s The Things They Carried (1990), the Wachowskis’ first Matrix film (1999), and various poems and short stories.

TERM 2
TTh, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

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 \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 start with 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 sometimes featuring as Richard actors who are themselves physically disabled or disfigured. Other core texts include Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There may be a couple of additional texts.

Your writing assignments in this course (two essays and a final exam) will develop skills in both critical thinking and university-level literary textual analysis, and both are much more generally useful and applicable than you might think. I hope there will also be a lot of lively discussion, both in class and on our Canvas site.

TERM 1
MW 10:00AM - 1:00PM

Robots, Artificial Intelligence, and Us.

AI is one of the most pressing technological and social questions of the current moment. Governments and corporations around the world are rushing to pour billions of dollars into AI research, all seeking to be the first to develop AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and to leverage other modes of AI (LLMs and the like). The social questions surrounding AI are numerous and pressing, yet they are not new. Writers have been exploring the potential impacts of AI on human society, and on human psychology, for many decades.

In this course we will explore the complex intimate relationships between humans and artificial intelligences through a range of literary texts from the 20th and 21st centuries. We will delve (a common LLM word) into a selection of seminal works that span various genres and perspectives, providing insights into the implications of our technological advancements on society, ethics, and identity.

The course texts will include the following: I, Robot; Neuromancer; The Lifecycle of Software Objects; The Murderbot Diaries, vol 1 (the two novellas All Systems Red and Artificial Condition); and Klara and the Sun; and a selection of films on AI.

ONLINE

This online course explores and examines contemporary English phonology, morphology, parts of speech, and lexical (word) meaning. We begin with the study of distinct speech sounds and possible sound combinations in English. Students will study the International Phonetic Alphabet as it applies to current varieties of English. Next, we study the processes of word formation and word classification in English. We then study word meaning (lexical semantics) using a variety of approaches. The course is offered from a descriptive perspective and is not focused exclusively on any specific linguistic theory. There are three collaborative assignments, five quizzes, graded discussions for each module and a final exam.

Students will be working fully online on all the course work. There are Zoom meetings and recorded lectures at regular intervals. The final exam is online. Zoom office hours are by appointment.

Required reading:

Brinton, Laurel J. and Donna M. Brinton. The Linguistic Structure of Modern English. John Benjamins, 2010. ISBN 978 90 272 1172 9.

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

ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

"Author's pen" and "actor's voice": Shakespeare in Text and Performance

This course will explore the extent to which we as readers of Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories, and comedies can remain engaged with his plays’ potential for realization onstage, in performance.  Part of our focus will be historicist: we will consider the institutional and social conditions attendant upon the original productions of the plays, as well as the ways in which the plays themselves dramatize matters of affect and spectatorship. Our work will also explore the formal dramaturgy of the plays in order to think about how the texts register the nuance of performance in obvious ways (in stage directions and dialogue) and by appealing to the senses and to the emotions of a live audience. We will also look at the editing, printing, and publishing of the plays in order to think about how the page simultaneously encodes and distorts performance for modern readers. Whenever possible, we will consider the performance history of the plays, with a particular emphasis on how modern adaptations for the stage make use of (cut, modify, rearrange, reimagine) the playtext.

TERM 1
TTh, 2:00PM - 5:00PM

Ghosts are Real (So are Vampires): Victorian Gothic Terror, Horror, and the Supernatural

“Ghosts are real, this much I know” – Edith Cushing, Crimson Peak

“There are such beings as vampires; some of us have evidence that they exist” – Abraham Van Helsing, Dracula

Whether we take Edith Cushing or Abraham Van Helsing at their word, the 19th-century Gothic revival certainly emphasized possibilities for terror and horror in tales of the supernatural. However, these interventions of spectral and un-dead beings often take place in the recognizable present; they speak to its anxieties. Perhaps they speak to ours as well, given our recent fascination with Neo-Victorian representations of the 19th century, such as Crimson Peak, as well as Penny Dreadful, From Hell, Sarah Waters’s Victorian trilogy, the numerous adaptations of Dracula (such as the recent third Nosferatu), plus many others.

We will examine fiction addressing issues of gender and sexuality; class, race, and culture; realism and the supernatural; urban and rural settings, all in a century known for developments in science and technology (especially photography), social upheaval, and a veneer of respectability, yet with monsters lurking in closets and under beds. Our focus will also permit consideration of the boom in publication of popular literature in a variety of formats, as well as the rise of the professional writer during the 19th century.

Core texts include Margaret Oliphant’s The Library Window, Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and selected short fiction possibly including M.R. James, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”; Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Old Nurse’s Story”; Sheridan LeFanu, “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street”; Mary Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne,” R.L. Stevenson, “The Body Snatcher”; E. Nesbit, “John Charrington’s Wedding” and maybe a couple of Victorian werewolf stories (since werewolf stories feature prominently in the research done for both Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s infamous Dracula). Evaluation will be based on a midterm essay, a term paper, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion both in class and on the course’s Canvas site.

ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS

“Down the Rabbit Hole”: Child, Nation and British Fantasy Literature 

Children’s books—encountered in the earliest stages of children’s development—can have a lasting influence on children’s views of their world and themselves. English 392 investigates how narratives of national identity in the folklore and myth-narratives are deployed in fantasy texts written for children in England. Some of our texts will come from Canadian Indigenous traditions to provide a comparison with classic texts from England. Texts will include fairy tales, The Hobbit, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, “Coyote Columbus”, and The Graveyard Book. These will be examined through a broad range of critical perspectives which are literary, socio-political and historical. The pictures of nation constructed in children’s books represent particular national myths and culturally-informed identities. We will look at the ways both “classic” and less traditionally canonical children’s texts create intertextual narratives that expand, resist, subvert and adapt each other’s work. This fully asynchronous 13-week course runs from May to August, with writing assignments and weekly discussion posts. The final examination, set in August, is the only synchronous component, and will be invigilated through Zoom. This course is part of the English Minor program in the Department of English Language and Literatures, but is open to English majors and to students in other programs.

We will post the course description as it becomes available.

TERM 2
TTh, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

“And the winner is . . .!”: Canada’s Literary Prize Culture

“In short, prizes matter. . .With only an appearance on . . . [a] shortlist, a book moves from total obscurity in the classroom and pages of literary criticism to respectable showings in both—and it gets a healthy popularity boost along the way.” --Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath and  J.D. Porter

In this class, we will discuss five fictional works which won Canadian literary prizes in 2024: Anne Michael’s Held (Giller Prize), Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces (Governor General’s Award for Fiction), Sheung-King’s Batshit Seven (Atwood-Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize), Catherine Leroux’s The Future (Canada Reads) and Darrel J. McLeod’s A Season in Chezgh’un (Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize). We will consider the institutional components of these prizes (evaluation criteria, selection of judges, procedures for submission and selection, history, past recipients) as well as what Manshel, McGrath & Porter refer to as the “consecrating forces and actors” which influence literary awards. In addition to writing a critical essay on one of the texts, students will participate as a jury member in an in-house “Fiction 2024” award committee to choose our own winner.

If you’re interested in truly contemporary fiction, the exigencies of literary prizes, evaluating fiction, and current directions in Canadian literature, then this is the course for you!

CROSS-LISTED WITH ENGL 491A-921
TERM 1
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Reading Indigenous Texts

How do we read Indigenous texts? How can reading help us think about what it means to be Indigenous – here, there, anywhere? What are the connections between writing, museums and universities? How can we think about the global, and about specificity, by engaging with Indigenous texts? Why read Indigenous texts in this present moment?

In this course, we will ask these questions by turning to recent collections of poetry by two very different Indigenous writers, Jenny Davis (Chickasaw) and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Marshallese), as well as short creative and critical texts by other writers; we will also ask them by connecting with some Indigenous ‘texts’ at the Museum of Anthropology on campus.

Students will have the opportunity to read texts of your choosing that connect our class discussions and readings with your own communities and networks. Evaluation will include short and long writing and research tasks, a reading log, and a short presentation.

CROSS-LISTED WITH ENGL 490-921
TERM 1
MW, 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Reading Indigenous Texts

How do we read Indigenous texts? How can reading help us think about what it means to be Indigenous – here, there, anywhere? What are the connections between writing, museums and universities? How can we think about the global, and about specificity, by engaging with Indigenous texts? Why read Indigenous texts in this present moment?

In this course, we will ask these questions by turning to recent collections of poetry by two very different Indigenous writers, Jenny Davis (Chickasaw) and Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Marshallese), as well as short creative and critical texts by other writers; we will also ask them by connecting with some Indigenous ‘texts’ at the Museum of Anthropology on campus.

Students will have the opportunity to read texts of your choosing that connect our class discussions and readings with your own communities and networks. Evaluation will include short and long writing and research tasks, a reading log, and a short presentation.

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

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

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

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

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

Black Studies Now

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

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

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

Studies in Poetry

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

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

Shadowing the Canon: Late-Medieval and Early Modern Romance

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

This course is a graduate-level introduction to the scholarly field of medieval romance studies. It will introduce students to this lively and surprising genre, the range of historical and contemporary theoretical approaches to the material, and to the survival and reinvigoration of the genre in the Early Modern period.

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

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

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

Term 2
THU, 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM
CROSS-LISTED WITH STS 501

Proseminar in Science and Technology Studies

This course surveys foundational and important texts in Science and Technology Studies (STS). Beginning with Thomas A. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the reading list will focus on STS scholars who have helped define the field over the decades (e.g. Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour), in addition to more recent influential contributions from the likes of Kim Tallbear and Shobita Parthasarathy. Taking Kuhn’s exhortation to pay more attention to rhetoric seriously, this class will often (but not always!) emphasize texts that examine the intertwining of science, technology, and medicine from the perspectives of rhetoric, discourse, media, and language.

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

Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Senses

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

--Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

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

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

Texts will include:

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

from

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

Jennifer Esmail, Reading Victorian Deafness

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

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

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

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

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

Modernist Fiction, Imperial Decline, and Decolonization

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

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

Folk Horror

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

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

Multimodal Communication: Text and Image

Communicative genres combining language with visual forms have become extremely common, if not outright inescapable. We encounter examples of such multimodal artifacts in our daily interaction with the internet and social media, with news and advertisements, as well as in comics and graphic novels. All these media genres develop their own patterns of interaction between image and text, while also prompting remarkable changes in the use of standard linguistic forms. Also, multimodal genres have now started ‘infecting’ each other linguistically.

This course will introduce students to analytical and theoretical tools we can use to better understand the meaning and form of multimodal artifacts. It will provide opportunities to study the linguistic and usage-related effects of the new genres in various contexts.

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

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

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

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

Keywords in Asian Diaspora Studies

The West Coast of what is now Canada has long been shaped by its intricate connections to the Pacific World. Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, Asian migrants were subjected to systematic forms of exclusion and racial violence. Although these measures were largely abolished in the mid-twentieth century, their legacies continue to be lived and felt to this day. What does it mean to do Asian diaspora studies from here - from the unceded Indigenous territories on which we are located? What critical questions emerge from local histories of migration and racialization?

This seminar takes up these questions by exploring a series of "keywords" in Asian diaspora studies. We will draw from fields such as postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, Asian Canadian critique, and inter-Asia critique in order to develop strategies for critically thinking and writing about transnational cultures. We will also engage with contemporary Asian Canadian cultural production by working with local institutions such as archives, museums, and galleries. Some classes may be held off campus - please contact the instructor in the summer if you have any questions about scheduling.

Theoretical readings may include selections from:

• Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe
• Chen Kuan-hsing, Asia as Method
• Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks
• Iyko Day, Alien Capital
• Lisa Lowe, The Intimacy of Four Continents
• Patrick Wolfe, Trace of History: Elementary Structures of Race
• Takeuchi Yoshimi, What is Modernity?

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

Introduction to Anti/Post/Decolonial Studies and Theory

“…the power of deceit does not weaken upon exposure…”  -- Taussig

Designed as an introduction to anti/post/decolonial studies, issues and theories, this course will feature selections from major works in the field focalized through the topics of gender/sexuality, solidarity, colonial erasures and anti/post/decolonial power. We will read selections of major texts as listed below to organize conversations between the different authors. Assuming no prior knowledge of the field or theory, the course should provide you with concepts and engagements portable to your own area/subfields. Texts we will read in their entirety: History of Sexuality, Vol.1, Culture and Imperialism and The Wretched of the Earth. Short novels will be read in tandem with the discursive works and may include: Rabih Alameddine’s Wrong End of the Telescope, Roberto Bolano’s Amulet, Ibtisam Azem’s Disappearance, and Zoe Wicomb’s David’s Story.

Selected chapters from:

• Judith Butler,   The Force of Non-Violence: An Ethico-Political Bind
• Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
• ---A Dying Colonialism
• Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol.1
• ---Security, Territory, Population
• Karima Lazali, Colonial Trauma
• Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony and Critique of Black Reason
• Afsaneh Najmabadi, Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-Sex Desire in Contemporary Iran
• Hortense Spillers, “Interstices” and “All the Things You Could Be By Now if Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race”
• Gayatri Spivak, Other Asias
• ---Critique of Postcolonial Reason
• Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism and Nervous System
• Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
• ---After the Last Sky (w/ Yeats)
• Francoise Verges, Monsters and Revolutionaries
• Zahi Zalloua, Fanon, Zizek and the Violence of Resistance
• Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness and the Promise of Universality

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

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

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

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

Modernism and the Psychoanalysis of Fascism, 1894-1945

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading List (in progress):

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

Suggested General and Preliminary Reading:

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

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

Race, Artificiality, Information 

This graduate seminar examines the discursive and material intersections of artifice and information—most commonly expressed in popular imaginaries as "artificial intelligence" or machine learning—as inquiries into the digital age's racial logics and racial mattering. Bringing together critical ethnic studies, critical race theory, new media studies, studies of visual culture, and feminist science and technology studies, this seminar offers interdisciplinary approaches for studying the way computation's materiality reiterates and emerges from imperialist and colonial legacies. But it also engages critical frameworks and practices that navigate, and even reroute, such networks. Readings may include: Simone Browne's Dark Matters, Ramon Amaro's The Black Technical Object, Wendy Chun's Updating to Remain the Same, Leslie Bow's Racist Love, Anne Cheng's Ornamentalism, Marisa Elena Duarte's Network Sovereignty.