2025 Summer Undergraduate Courses

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

We will post the course description as it becomes available.

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

We will post the course description as it becomes available.