ENGL 200 is a collaboratively-taught exploration of key scholarly, theoretical, and critical approaches informing the study of literatures in English at UBC. Through a diverse set of readings that cross genre, historical periods, and social contexts, this course aims to develop skills in reading, analysis, and critical writing. Students in the course will work closely with one faculty instructor in a small-class setting. Three of these small classes will join together in a cluster for one lecture on each week’s designated texts and topic.
This team-taught course (led by Drs. Michael Zeitlin, Suzanne James, Bo Earle and Ramesh Mallipeddi) examines how literature defines where we come from, where we are going and how the meagre yet crucial words “we” and “I” mean what they do. Considering literary genres including lyric poetry, myth, the short story, the novel, science fiction, memoire and non-fiction history of society, science and nature, we will explore the construction and deconstruction of identity across the levels of the individual, the family, the nation, the species, the planet, the material universe and spiritual cosmos.
Course Texts:
- Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
- As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
- Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi
- “How to Pronounce Knife” by Souvankham Thammavongsa, Thomas King’s ”Borders,” and other indigeonous Canadian short fiction
- The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson
- Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Selected poetry and prose from Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Mary and Percy Shelley and Lord Byron