2025 Winter

Learn more about the Ways of Knowing degree requirement for students entering the BA degree program. For 2025W, the Department of English Language and Literatures offers ENGL 230 and ENGL 376 as courses 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

English 100 provides a writing-intensive introduction to language and literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. It fulfills the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement and is recommended for students intending to take a Major or Honours in English.

Fragmented Identities and Multiple Selves

This section of English 100 will explore representations of ambiguous and multifaceted identities in a range of diverse texts: two novels (Frankenstein and Freshwater), three short stories ("The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Secret Sharer") and two of Sylvia Plath's poems ("Lady Lazarus" and "Mad Girl's Love Song"). In class lectures and discussions, we will consider the historical and cultural contexts in which these works were produced as well as a range of theoretical and critical approaches.

Course assignments will focus on developing university-level skills of critical analysis and response, academic writing and research. There will be no final examination in this course.

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

Literature as a Transformative Space

English 100 provides a writing-intensive introduction to language and literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. In this section, we will be exploring works of  literature that engage with transformations of all kinds and with texts that transgress expectations. We will examine how authors transpose genders, transform between species, transport across time, and translate the environment through the study of three novels (Virgina Woolf’s Orlando, Fifteen Dogs by Andre Alexis, and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being) alongside the poetry of rita wong in forage and Kim Fu’s amazing short stories Lesser Known Monsters of the 21^st Century. Assessment will be based on a series of smaller assignments, scaffolded to the final research paper and a creative rewrite.

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

Awakenings

This course offers a writing-intensive introduction to literary studies and fulfils the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement. The course is open only to students in the Faculty of Arts and is recommended for students intending to enter the Majors or Honours program in English Language and Literatures. Students will write short essays in class; engage in discussion and intellectual exchange in the classroom; do informal close readings (aloud); and write one longer take-home essay. There will also be a final exam.

Please note: this course is resolutely unfriendly to AI tools and CHATGPT etc.

Reading List:

• Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (1925)
• Kate Chopin, "Desirée's Baby" (1893)
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (1841)
• Emily Dickinson, poems (1855-1865)
• Sophocles, Antigone (440 BC)
• Joan Didion, "On Keeping a Notebook" (1968)
• Joan Didon, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" (1966)
• Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1966)

Term 1
MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 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 respond to previous texts and traditions. We will read three 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 recent play by British writer Zadie Smith, 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 Macbeth alongside Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novel Wyrd Sisters (which also riffs on Hamlet, but there’s only so much we can read!). 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

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

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 various questions arising in creating through adaptation a separate text in a different genre. Our approach will be in literary and cultural studies rather 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 whether visualizing them using an existing narrative results in a transfusion, a transformation, or both.

Core texts tentatively include two novels, J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and three film adaptations: one of Carmilla and two of Dracula (to be determined by class vote), as well as Gardner and Diaz, Reading and Writing About Literature (6th 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 midterm essay and a term paper (both 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

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

The Unruly Self in Literature and Culture

New York high society and its sometimes vicious marriage market at the turn of the twentieth century in Edith Wharton’s stories, a “Brotherhood” of 1940s communist activists in a city filled with racial tensions in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the absurd talk-show circuit of Don DeLillo’s drama Valparaiso, homophobic small-town America in Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home . . . These are some of the settings and social orders the heroes and heroines of this course have to navigate. We will follow these characters as they sometimes rebel against and sometimes acquiesce to the orders and institutions in which they find themselves. Why isn’t the self easily tamed by society’s demands and norms? We conclude the course with Werner Herzog’s astonishing documentary film about a man among the bears, Grizzly Man. This course offers students an introduction to the skills and practices of literary criticism. Through a focus on writing assignments across the term, students will learn how to ask rich and provocative questions about literary texts, how to build interpretations around highly focused work with a text’s individual words and images, and how to use literature and film as a lens for understanding historical contexts and social problems. Through invigorating reading and viewing experiences, students will build an arsenal of strong interpretive and writing techniques for their university futures.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

The Quest for Self

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

Cinematic Interiors

This section of English 100 explores the evolving role of space in shaping storytelling across film and television. Focusing on the films of directors such as Hitchcock, Coppola, and Bong, as well as TV series like Severance and Succession, we’ll look at domestic interiors, workplaces, curated environments, communal settings, and transitional spaces to consider how cinematic spaces function as sites of mood, meaning, and narrative tension. We’ll explore how cultural and technological shifts are changing our relationships to space, presence, and perception. Themes include the collapse of shared narratives, the erosion of trust in once-stable spaces, and the fragmented self in surveillance culture. Drawing on film theory, design, and narrative analysis, students will gain tools to analyze visual and spatial storytelling.

Short, scaffolded writing assignments, informed by key readings from Steven Jacobs and others, will support the development of interpretive and analytical skills.
No prior film experience required - just curiosity and a willingness to look closely.

Term 2

MWF, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

This course reads fantasy and speculative fiction to explore the many ways in which writers imagine how societies and cultures might be... otherwise. Fantastic and speculative worlds are some of the richest forms of experimental thought, problem solving and storytelling in which we engage. How do writers make these worlds persuasive? What kinds of connections do they expect us to make between their storyworlds and the actual world? What influences differences among the ways they take up similar themes? We will discover multiple answers to these questions. Along the way, we will also learn general principles about narrative and fiction as they are theorized in English, and how writing works at an analytical level, by discussing matters such as plot, figuration, character, point of view, and setting. Writers include Le Guin, Bradbury, Orwell, Angela Carter, Vonnegut, Ishiguro, Karen Tei Yamashita.

Term 2

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

A writing-intensive introduction to the disciplines of literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. Fulfils 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. This course is not eligible for Credit/D/Fail grading.

This course is an introduction to the art of reading and writing about literature. Our meetings will be devoted to reading about literature. These sessions will focus on Octavia Butler’s Kindred as well as two of its adaptations—the graphic novel and the FX TV series. We will deepen our understanding of these texts and their contexts by: engaging with scholarly articles that explore historical context and audience; reading in current criticism and theory; and developing strategies for textual analysis in literary and cultural studies. Over the term, students will be able to develop their own conclusions about literature and literary criticism, while developing their skills as academic writers.

Our meetings will also be spent tackling writing. To put it another way, ENGL 100 is a writing course that uses literature as its topic; because it meets the Faculty of Arts Writing Requirement, the focus must clearly be on scholarly writing throughout the course. You will write weekly responses, two short essays, and a term paper requiring secondary research.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 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, excerpts 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, and Octavia E. Butler’s Blood Child and Other Stories

Term 2

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Villains and Villainy

One of the most enduring figures in literature is the villain or antagonist. In this section, we will want to ask why this might be by focusing on a variety of literary villains in fiction, poetry, and drama. Villains force us to confront a number of question, and ethical ones in particular: what makes villains so attractive to both writers and readers? Are villains sometimes justified? And ultimately, what might their ambition, criminality and charisma tell us about ourselves?

Mark Breakdown:

• Participation: 10%
• In-class essay #1: 15%
• In-class essay #2: 20%
• Term paper: 25%
• Final Exam: 30%

Reading List:

• Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado” (online)
• William Shakespeare, Othello
• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Final Problem” from The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 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 creative work with languages and media.

Term 2

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

The description for this course is not yet available.

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.

You will be required to have read Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (Vintage) in its entirety by Tuesday, January 20th (the third week of term). Please begin reading before term begins.

Course requirements:

• thoughtful and informed participation (1% for each lecture and small-group discussion class) - 20%
• in-class essay #1 - 15%
• in-class essay #2 - 15%
• at-home paper (approximately 1500 words) - 20%
• Canvas Discussions post (4%) and reply (1%) - 5%
• final exam - 25%

Our texts:

Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (Vintage); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview print edition, eBook); 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); the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) Elders, “Ch’ich’iyúy: The Two Sisters” (.pdf to be posted on Canvas); selections from Richard Wagamese, Embers: One Ojibway’s Meditations (Douglas & McIntyre print edition, UBC Library eBook (the eBook does not include the splendid photographs)); a selection of poems (all available online) by Sarah Howe, Theresa Muñoz, and Alice Te Punga Somerville.

Term 2

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

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.

Term 2

MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Horror/Science: Gothic Echoes in Science Fiction

“It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter IV.

Over 40 years ago, Patrick Brantlinger argued in “The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction” that a problem in reading Science Fiction as “realistic prophecy … arises from the fact that the conventions of science fiction derive from the conventions of fantasy and romance, and especially from those of the Gothic romance. Science fiction grows out of literary forms that are antithetical to realism.” More recently, two 2019 essays by Daniel Pietersen on Sublime Horror (republished on his own site), “The universe is a haunted house – the Gothic roots of science fiction” and “Spiders and flies – the Gothic monsters of sci-fi horror,” explore the intersection of terror and horror tropes in what we can only call Gothic Science Fiction.

This course is not about slick shiny optimistic visions of the future. It’s not about science research that has vastly benefitted worlds and their inhabitants: it’s about bizarre singular passion projects and their progeny, about science gone wrong, about the byways of pseudoscience. We will examine contemporary approaches to the Gothic and apply them to various primary texts.

Core texts tentatively include Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 edition); Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and/or H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau; Alien (dir. Ridley Scott) and another film or novel (possibly Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake), as well as Gardner and Diaz, Reading and Writing About Literature (6th 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 midterm essay and a term paper (both 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, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Haunted Houses

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 such 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 Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Alan Garner, The Owl Service; Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger; Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching; and The Others (dir. Alejandro Amenábar); as well as Gardner and Diaz, Reading and Writing About Literature (6th 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 midterm essay and a term paper (both 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

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, with 30-student Friday discussion groups for hands-on practice of literary analysis.

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, revenge+romantasy play, The Tempest. You can stream videos of different theatre productions of Tempest for free through the UBC library or hunt out the great 2010 film, starring Helen Mirren and Djimon Hounsou.

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 this course will qualify you for lots of future paths!

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. After reading Shelley’s original novel, we will explore a selection of adaptations of Frankenstein in fiction, film, comics, and various other media. Assignments will include both in-class and take-home writing and a final exam.

Term 1

MW, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

We’ll read a selection of short stories (some very short, some longer; some funny, some sad) from the last 200 years or so. We’ll consider the different kinds of narration, plot structure, point of view, and beginnings and endings. Students will gain an appreciation for what it means to tell stories.

Term 1

MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Literature and the Media

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, information culture, media history, Indigenous media theory, and AI. 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

Counternarratives in comics, fiction & poetry

 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 Vietnamese refugee in California, 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, Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese, Medium by Johanna Skibsrud.

Term 2

MW, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

This course is intended to introduce 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 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 engages with 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

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

MW, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

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). However, the concept of Artificial Intelligence is far from new, and writers have been thinking about the implications of non-human machine intelligences for centuries, in ways that range from the utopian to the apocalyptic. From the benevolent AI overseers of Asimov's imagination to the genocidal self-aware Skynet of the Terminator films, AI has been imagined as humanity's best friend and our worst nightmare, and everything in-between.

In this course we will explore the complex intimate relationships between humans and artificial intelligences through a range of literary texts. 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 some of the following texts: I, Robot; The Lifecycle of Software Objects; The Murderbot Diaries, vol 1 (the two novellas All Systems Red and Artificial Condition); Klara and the Sun; a range of short fiction; and a selection of films on AI.

Term 2

MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

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, monsters, robots, 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 1

MW, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Manifesting the People in Writing and Speech  

Government is everywhere. Governments aren’t perfect.  One result of this pair of intersecting truisms is the preoccupation with calling for and making a difference that runs through so much political writing and speech. Whether in addresses to a crowd or in written exhortations, political writing and speech aims to make something happen, and that something, most often, is change. This course considers texts whose writers address what they frame—or seek to call into being—as an audience of political change agents: the people. Texts considered may include manifestos, open letters, instruction books, political addresses, broadsides, pamphlets, movies, political cartoons, and/or memes. In a packet of theoretical excerpts, the course will introduce you to critical frames for considering these texts and their kinds, and your own and your colleagues’ critical and political agency in relation to them. In a series of written and multimedia assignments, individual and collaborative, this course will prompt you to produce analyses of political discourse—and a short political discourse of your own.

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

Rhetoric, Controversy, & 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

Metaphor and Friends: How Language Reflects (and Supports) our Creativity

Most of us believe that our everyday communication is essentially conducted via literal language. The goal of this course is to show you that there are at least two ways in which such a belief is not accurate. First, much of what we communicate, whether in conversations with peers or in an academic context, relies heavily on figurative expressions. We will consider various areas of communication (conversation, journalism, politics, science, literature, etc) to see how our everyday language relies on metaphor and its “friends” (whom we will meet in class!).

Secondly, contemporary communication also relies heavily on images (many scholars refer to such uses as ‘multimodal)’. We will study examples of various multimodal genres (ads, campaigns, memes, etc.) to understand how and why language works together with images. Through these two strands, we will see why language can be (metaphorically!) described as a toolkit supporting creativity and problem solving.

We will read about relevant concepts and read to see language at work. We will spend much time in class discussing examples (some of which you yourselves will bring for our consideration and enjoyment). And we will also write, so as to engage closely with texts, examples, and ideas, and also to give a boost to our creativity.

Term 1

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Migrations

This course focuses on the themes of migration and movement—of people, commodities, texts, and cultures—across a range of geographical locations and historical times.  We will also consider the related question of how and when mobilities become restricted.  Who travels and who stays?  What are the histories that have brought about forced and voluntary migrations? How are identities shaped in response to encounters with cultural difference, and through experiences of exile and displacement?  How are texts translated and adapted across different audiences and cultures? Texts we will study are likely to include Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and its adaptations; Teju Cole’s Open City; Ling Ma’s Severance; Brian Friel’s Translations; as well as a selection of poetry and film.

Term 1

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Interconnectedness

Writing in 1768, the German philosopher and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing asserted that “in nature, everything is bound together; everything interconnects, everything is interchangeable with everything else, everything changes from one thing to another.” Lessing went on to define reading as a process in which “finite spirits”—humans—can “take their share of pleasure” in interconnectedness by “develop[ing] the capacity to isolate elements and direct their attention at will.” This course approaches interconnectedness in both of these ways. Together we’ll attend to ways literary texts (poems, short stories, novels, and a play) establish and examine connections between individuals, peoples, places, spaces, species, environments, and ideas. We’ll also consider our own acts of reading: how they honour connectedness and the big picture and how, at times, considering connections requires us to focus more narrowly, on textual details and individual responses. Course assignments will prompt students to read individually and together, fostering dialogue among texts and among the members of this course.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Remix: Texts, Mediation, and Cultural Power

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

Sovereignty in Medieval and Early Modern British Literature

 How does a community justify the right to rule or to self-rule? Is a king’s body in fact two? Can a survivor of violence regain control over their own body? What makes regions into a nation? In a society where women have limited rights, how can a queen rule over all? These—and many more—are questions of sovereignty, the controversial and nebulous concept that deals with the authority to decide. In this course, we will investigate how the multilingual literature of Britain before 1800—from Anglo-Norman (e.g., French) romance to Welsh poetry to early modern English drama—addresses the problem of sovereignty. All work will be read in English. We will focus on how literature lends itself to claims of political and religious sovereignty and how sovereignty underwrites national identities and British imperialism. In so doing we will also explore ecology, racialization and Indigeneity, gender and sexuality, and the politics of language, form, and genre.

Term 1

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

This course surveys British Literature from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. It aims to introduce students to a wide sampling of literary works of poetry, fiction, and drama across the period. While these works engage a diverse variety of topics, in reading 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 these texts in their historical and cultural contexts, we should also, where appropriate, allow ourselves to approach them with a sense of openness and humour.

Course Requirements and Policies

Mark Breakdown:

• Participation:  10%
• In-class essay:  20%
• Term paper:     40%
• Final exam:      30%

Novels:

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Penguin)
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales (Oxford)
• George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin)
• Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (Vintage)

Poetry and Drama: The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, Concise Edition, Vol. B. SECOND EDITION. Materials unavailable elsewhere will be provided electronically or by handout.

Term 1

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Aliens, Monsters, and Shapeshifters: (Re)Invention in Asian Canadian Literature

“She fumbles, the stutter of birthing an unwelcome / child to a violent nation that does not know it” (Natalie Wee, “Can You Speak English?”)

This section of ENGL 222 will explore the unfolding of Asian Canadian literature in a variety of genres. It will begin by considering “beginnings,” and the fraught positions of Asian Canadians in relation to the nation-state (Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill, Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child) before shifting to diasporic movements and community-formation (Kim Thúy’s Ru). The class will engage with questions related to labour and fierce embodiment (Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick a Colour, Natalie Wee’s Beast at Every Threshold), and then conclude by considering the city as an intersectional space for asserting belonging (Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough).

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 you could upload your consciousness into a new body? What if cyborgs wrote poetry? What if a child’s emotional distress resulted in transformation 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 contested 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 speculation. 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. Note—many of our texts, operating in fictional genres like apocalypse, dystopia, and horror, address contexts that are often uncomfortably real and challenging, and can take us to some troubling places (usually, they lead us back out of them, often to more hopeful places). We will analyze these works with care and sensitivity, but reader beware.

Term 2

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Apartheid and its Afterlives

2024 marked 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

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Role Playing: Drama, Performance, and Identity

According to Jacques in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players.” Drama is an ideal form for thinking about the roles we play, the cultural scripts that have been assigned to us, and how we perform who are. Along with learning how to read and analyze drama, we will explore how drama can help us think about the relationship between who we are and how we “act.” We will likely read Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Cliff Cardinal’s William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, A Radical Retelling, Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Suzan Lori-Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, Djanet Sears, The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search of God, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Wig Out, and Madeline Sayet’s Where We Belong.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Beauties, Beasts, and Wonderlands

We all know the stories of Beauty and the Beast and Alice in Wonderland. Or do we?

In this course we will explore how and why Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have 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. Questions that we will ask include: why has Le Prince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” inspired successive generations of authors and artists while Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s “La Belle et la Bête” (Le Prince de Beaumont’s source) is largely forgotten? Why is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, translated into more than 175 languages, exceptionally popular in Japan, where it has been reimagined in everything from literature and art to video games and household goods? How does Alice’s visual identity from the nineteenth century to the present (re)define her as a fashion icon?

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 texts and some of their adaptations and reimaginings, and in our and the original readers’ and viewers’ interpretations.

The focus of our discussions will be the three original texts: Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s “La Belle et la Bête,” translated by Aurora Wolfgang (UBC Library); Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast,” The Young Misses Magazine (UBC Library); and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview print edition, eBook). We will also analyze in detail Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la bête, Jonathan Miller’s 1966 telefilm Alice in Wonderland, and Elizabeth LaPensée and KC Oster’s 2022 graphic novel Rabbit Chase (Annick Press print edition, eBook). Please note that our discussions of the 1951 Disney Alice in Wonderland and the 1991 Disney Beauty and the Beast will be brief, focusing on how the films continue to define the literary works in the popular imagination.

Assignments: Assignments will include an in-class essay, an at-home paper, and a final exam.

Term 1

TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

In this course we’ll reflect on Canadian English, defined as any variety of English spoken and used in Canada. We will distinguish between Canadian English, Standard Canadian English, and start to think about what an “Inclusive Standard Canadian English” might look like. We review the state of our knowledge about Canadian English, match it to our own personal experience (or lack thereof), and other forms of English used in Canada, including Indigenous Englishes. We will approach Canadian English from sociolinguistic and sociohistorical perspectives: How did it come about? Who decided when that Canadian English was its own variety? Why is it the way it is? Why do some not know much about it (perhaps you)? Bring a curious and open mind.

Deliverables:

• Class presentation: 5 minutes on a feature of Canadian English
• Project: we aim to improve Wikipedia coverage on Canadian English
• Exams: midterm and final exam

Select materials (to be completed):

• Dollinger, Stefan. 2019. Creating Canadian English: The Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English. Cambridge University Press.
• Walker, James A. 2015. Canadian English: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. London: Routledge.

Term 2

MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Storying Place: Introduction to Reading Place & Power in Vancouver and BC

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

This course introduces students to reading literary and cultural representations of “place” as they intersect with practices of power in the context of the West Coast of what is currently called Canada. It examines works by local authors and artists from, about, or associated with Vancouver and BC, emerging from a variety of Indigenous, diaspora, and settler contexts. Theories of place will inform our approach to reading a range of positions and perspectives on literary Vancouver in works that address various geographic and communal places: from our local surroundings here at UBC’s Point Grey campus and Pacific Spirit Park, on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) territory; to Kitsilano, Main Street, Chinatown, Hogan’s Alley, the Downtown Eastside, and other past and present neighbourhoods in the city; to the coastal environments of the Pacific Northwest and the Salish Sea. Our guiding questions will be: What is “place”? How is it a way of seeing and understanding the world? How does literature function in the making of place(s), particularly as they become contested in the context of power? How have Indigenous and other communities historically marginalized in/by Vancouver mobilized cultural production in response to ongoing histories of settler-colonial erasure, racial exclusion, gentrification, and environmental disruption? How does reading “place” (including forms of displacement) make visible the intimate ways that dynamics of power are enacted, felt, embodied, resisted, and imagined by writers and communities?

We will take up these and other questions by considering place and power in local literatures, looking to such narrative forms as short stories, novels, poetry, creative non-fiction, speculative fiction, and digital media. Assignments will position you in place and community and encourage students to understand themselves as variously “inside” the stories of place we study, enabling you to analyze place-based texts, mix critical and creative modes of inquiry, and bring student class participants collaboratively together.

Term 1
MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 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 2
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

MediAnthropology

While media studies has its roots in anthropology, this origin story has been relatively neglected until recently, gaining increasing attention that has culminated in the publication of studies such as Media Anthropology (2005), Anthropology of Globalization (2008), Anthropology of News and Journalism (2010), Anthropology of Images (2011), Sonic Persona: An Anthropology of Sound (2018), Music and Digital Media: A Planetary Anthropology (2023), the 600 page Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology (2023), and Anthropology of Digital Practices (2024), to name only a few. This course draws on the instructor’s The 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 of their choice. The course will provide students with a grounding in media theory, an overview of media anthropology, and practical experience in applying this learning.

Term 1

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 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 landmark novel Frankenstein. Shelley’s tale evokes dread in the implications of Victor’s generation of a humanoid Creature; this dread echoes in more recent fictional products or accidents of science: clones, robots and replicants, artificial intelligences, cyborgs. Such texts raise issues concerning 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 or Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; 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) or one other novel, to be announced.

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

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Speculative Fiction: Talking to Tolkien

The starting point for this course is J.R.R. Tolkien’s wildly influential The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien drew on his own interest in languages, and his own career as a professor of medieval literature, to craft the world of Middle Earth, and ever since, his work has been a touchstone in the fantasy genre. We will start with the first volume of LOTR, The Fellowship of the Ring (though of course you’re welcome to read the whole thing!) and then explore other novels that responded in different ways to Tolkien’s world-building. Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn gives us a non-human quester with a wizard sidekick and philosophical musings on humanity and mortality. Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea explores how the young wizard Ged finds his path and his power. Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire is an epic fantasy with a magic system based on metals, while Jin Yong’s A Hero Born, a hugely popular wuxia novel, combines Chinese history with kung fu magic. Finally, Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring blends dystopia and Caribbean magic as its single-mother protagonist must move through a Toronto that is both familiar and strange.

Term 1

MWF,  2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

TTh, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM 

Adaptation: ‘Which was better, the book or the film?’

The above question has too often become the cornerstone of modern debates around adaptation. Our objective in this course will be to reframe the ways in which we might consider and discuss the many and varied relationships between various genres of literature and film. The scope of our discussion will range from detailed examinations of particular passages and scenes to the re-definition of concepts and re-shaping of terminology in an effort to explore how literature and film can speak to each other as different but equal partners. Instead of considering adaptation as a lit-centric field, in which the value of a film is based on its fidelity to the ‘original’ text, we’ll look at the ways in which film and literature engage in fruitful and productive conversations with each other.

We’ll consider how stories adapt to the aesthetic and commercial demands of multiple genres – novels, comic books, short stories, screenplays, and films. In the process, we’ll read some adaptation theory and study the cultural contexts surrounding both the source text and its adaptation. In so doing, we’ll explore the ways in which these two different media use diverse forms of technological representation to engage with a number of cultural and social issues. We’ll finish the course by considering more recent attempts within the field of adaptation to move beyond the unidirectional movement of literature to film, as content moves away from notions of a single, stable source and an identifiable author, and towards an era of transmedia creation by multiple entities and media conglomerates.

Term 2

TTh, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM 

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1
MWF, 1:00 PM - 2:00 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 quirkily and sometimes surreally adapted from Gothic, mystery, and especially “hard-boiled” detective stories from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Since the 1960s, Noir has 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 film to 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 a selection of 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; students will also have a chance to develop creative skills by writing their own hard-boiled or noir story.

Term 1

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

This introduction to critical theory is themed around crowds, democracy, and politics. We will explore theories of agency and forms of democracy, phenomena such as group aggression and utopianism, technologies for the persuasion and control of crowds, ideologies underlying populisms and authoritarianisms, and philosophies of bare life and biopolitics. It seems an appropriate moment to rethink the crowd and its history, when asylum seeking and global migrations, d/evolving democracies, virtual-digital crowds, and crowd-based political movements around the world are calling for our attention. We will also draw on the literary as a productive archive for this critique. As we proceed, we will build a theory of the performativity of the crowd.

Readings and films include selections from Marx, Charles Baudelaire, Gustave Le Bon, Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Fritz Lang, Sean O’Casey, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, Jacques Ranciére, others.

Term 2
TTh, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM
The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

History and Theory of Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric

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

In this course we will be tracing the development of the English language from its Indo-European beginnings to the Middle English period. We will deal with the internal development of the language (its ‘structure’) on all levels: sounds (phonology), grammar (morphology & syntax), word meaning (semantics) and orthography and some select pragmatic features (language in use). We will also explore the most important events in the language-external history (‘political, social and cultural history’) that shaped the language. As we are covering a period of more than a thousand years, our aim is to put the various stages of development in relation to each other: what happened when and with what results – and, if possible, why. Along the way we will be dealing with texts from different periods.

Requirements:

• Group presentation
• Etymology research project
• Midterm and final exams

Core Readings:

• Knooihuizen, Remco. 2023. The Linguistics of the History of English. Cham: Springer.
• Brinton, Laurel J. and Leslie K. Arnovick. 2016. The English Language: A Linguistic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Term 2
MW, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

As of June 16, 2025: This course is being offered in Term 2

This course will introduce you to the basics of how English is described and used in both spoken and written forms. First we will consider and evaluate the notions of descriptivism and prescriptivism, and learn about standardization and the history behind modern English grammar rules (Unit 1). Next, we will discuss key parts of the English grammatical system: parts of speech; noun and verb phrases; clause structure; and tense, aspect, and mood (Unit 2). Finally, we will take a broader look at English usage and variation, from the evolving language of Internet English to variation in Englishes around the world (Unit 3).

Required texts:

• Berk, Lynn, English Syntax: From Word to Discourse. (Oxford University Press, 1999.)Curzan, Anne, Fixing English: Prescriptivims and Language History. (Cambridge University Press, 2014.)McCulloch, Gretchen, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. (Riverhead Books, 2019).

Course assessments include a brief essay (Unit 1); a midterm exam and self-testing homework exercises (Unit 2); and a group project that explores some aspect of variation in English (Unit 3). The final exam is comprehensive.

Term 2
Online Asynchronous

The fully online stylistics course explores the creativity of literary language use. Before embarking on doing stylistics, we consider the significant shifts that have taken place in the development of stylistics up to the current interest in cognitive and corpus stylistics. A large part of the course work involves analyzing examples of poems, prose narratives and plays using stylistic tools to identify and interpret their respective characteristic communication strategies.

The term paper focuses on selected findings that have been reported in a recent corpus stylistic study on the writing style of a famous novelist (and Nobel laureate). You will be asked to replicate a few of these published findings in your own small-scale analysis of an extract or a very short story by the same author. By comparing your findings with the published findings you will be enabled to substantiate your own interpretation of the narrative you analyzed.

Requirements:

• 2 Workshops with recorded presentations
• Term paper
• Graded discussions
• Graded exercises
• Final exam

Textbooks:

• Short, Mick. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose. Longman, 1996.
• Simpson, Paul. Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students, 3^rd ed. Routledge, 2026 (if available in time, otherwise 2^nd ed. Routledge, 2014).

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Hybrid Delivery

How many Englishes are there? What’s English anyway? What is Canadian English? What is Pidgin English? 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 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).

Text:

• Jenkins, Jennifer. 2025. Global Englishes: A Resource Book for Students. 4^th edition. Routledge.

Requirements:

• Student reflections
• Oral presentation at mini conference
• Midterm and final exams

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 understand better 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 use their analytical skills throughout.

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

Cognitive Poetics

Language use in literary texts builds on standard forms and concepts, while pushing their meaning potential to the limits by extending or re-designing what is available. Such mechanisms of creativity are the subject matter of this course. To understand the processes involved and learn how textual meaning is built and received, we study cognitive approaches to language and apply the concepts to literary discourse and other creative genres. We study poetry, narrative fiction, and drama, also by putting these genres in the context of contemporary discourse and visual culture (film, internet memes, advertising, political and cultural campaigns, etc.). The concepts investigated show students how to connect the study of language and literature to an understanding of how the human mind processes and creates meaning. This approach, combining the study of language, literature, and conceptualization, is known as Cognitive Poetics.

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 1

Online Asynchronous

As of June 16, 2025 this course is being offered in Term 1

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

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 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 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 medium, 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 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 and networks in which makers, users, and materials 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

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 written 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
TTh, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

The Arthur of the Britons

Term 1

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Chaucer: Canterbury Tales

This course will introduce you to the world of Chaucer and late medieval English literary culture. You will read stories of trickery and adventure, of romance and revelry, as Chaucer’s pilgrims travel through a world rich in satire and social commentary. Chaucer’s characters have left indelible marks on English literature, both in their medieval incarnations and their traces and influence on other texts over the centuries. Jealous carpenters, drunken millers, aggressive wives, and lecherous priests jostle for attention with pious parsons, wealthy monks, and noble knights. The late medieval world is brought to riotous life in Chaucer’s words, constructing an age that – far from being dark – explodes in polycromatic and polyvocal splendour.

In this 13-week course we will read (most of) Chaucer’s best-known work, The Canterbury Tales, and by the end of the course you will be comfortable both with reading Middle English and working within the literary culture of the late fourteenth century.

Term 1

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 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 2
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

One of the literary forms that now seems distinctively early modern to us is the essay. In this course, we’ll read the two greatest essayists of the period: the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne and the Englishman Sir Thomas Browne. Both were highly intelligent, well read, unfailingly curious about more or less everything, and frequently weird. They thought often and well about the world they lived in; we’ll think with them.

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 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 Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, 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

Drawing on the instructor’s Mediatic Shakespeare (UTP 2025), the course provides a unique focus on the plays of Shakesepeare, arguing that many of them dramatise the early modern media shift out of a largely oral culture into a culture that is increasingly literate, a shift exacerbated by the growing prominence of print. The course will introduce students to media theory, as well as to the historical and cultural contexts of Shakespeare’s work.

Term 2
Online Asynchronous

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

The only text in this course is Milton’s Paradise Lost. We’ll move through at the leisurely pace of one book per week. Our primary focus will be on the poem as poetry. No prior experience with Christianity or the Bible is necessary.

Term 1

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

So much drama! Eighteenth-century stage comedy

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 several types of comedy, from subversive and smutty to heartfelt and sentimental (with a sidequest on mad burlesque), the six plays in this course contributed to cultural dialogues on the relative identities of the nation and the individual through such conflicting elements as heroics, religious critique, brilliant wit, political subversion, and some rather explicit sex. We will consider the ways in which English playwrights and stage practices both queried and reinscribed ideas of sexuality and marriage, gender normativity, intellect and passion, and violence and its burlesques, as well as the ways the theatrical 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—sparklingly witty and pitch dark—on the Restoration’s most lasting genre, witty libertine sex comedy. Or try the quite startling, proto-postmodern comedy with a Nabokov-esque mad editor in Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2
TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

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)

Songs were among the most popular media of the period in British literary history we now know as the “Romantic” (1780-1830), but British Romanticism is rarely considered to have been a musical phenomenon. This course corrects that oversight. By way 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 examine the ways 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. We will also contemplate the importance of music to Romanticism’s political impulses and to explore how poetic music opens up questions of feeling, environment, volition, desire, identity, race, sexuality, personal growth, and social order. Primary readings will feature poems by Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson, William Blake, Thomas Moore, and Laetitia Elizabeth Landon (LEL). Writing assignments will encourage students to extend their creative, critical, and research skills. No previous education, skill, or talent in music is necessary to succeed in this course—but enjoying music and being open to its spirit and effects will definitely help.

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Some Versions of American Gothic

Authors may include Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, Henry James, William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, and J. D. Salinger. Their works trace the sources of American darkness to the realities of a violent history represented in sometimes forthright but more often in formally vexed and psychologically distorted ways. Students will write short essays in class; engage in discussion and exchange in the classroom; do informal close readings (aloud); and write one longer take-home essay. There will also be a final exam.

Please note: this course is resolutely unfriendly to AI tools and CHATGPT etc. The confirmed reading list will posted by November 2025.

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

The Victorian Novel

“The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.”
–  Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

In this section we will explore the social, aesthetic, and economic contexts that informed the nineteenth century’s most popular genre, the novel. Despite its relative predominance, the Victorian novel is more diverse than monolithic, and we will be paying close attention to a variety of nineteenth-century fictional modes, including social comedy, realism, detective fiction, and the gothic.

 PLEASE NOTE: reading in advance is STRONGLY ENCOURAGED. Victorian novels are not known for their brevity.

Reading List

• Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
• Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
• Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
• Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
• Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Evaluation

• Informed Participation: 10%
• Regular Reading Quizzes: 10%
• Midterm: 20%
• Term Paper: 30%
• Final Exam: 30%

Term 2

TTh, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The Victorian Fairy Tale: Text and Image

“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice,
“without pictures or conversations?”

During the Victorian period there were more illustrated books and periodicals in circulation than ever before. Publishers exploited the power of the visual to attract readers, commissioning illustrators who were as well known, sometimes better known, than the authors. The illustrations often attracted as much attention—and, yes, sometimes more attention—than the texts, and represent the earliest published responses to the literary works.

In this course we will explore the relationship between text and image in a selection of Victorian fairy tales, both original tales and rewritings of traditional tales. How do the illustrations define the literary texts? To what extent do the illustrations reinscribe, revise, and/or subvert the assumptions, both aesthetic and ideological (e.g., with respect to gender, race, class, sexuality, mental and physical ability, the environment, ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, etc.), implicit in the tales and in our—and the Victorians’—readings of them?

Approximately half of our classes will take place in UBC Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections where we will work with early editions of the tales and discuss them in relation to Victorian print culture. We will ask such questions as: To what extent does the dominance of George Cruikshank’s designs for the Fairy Library obscure his intention to promote the temperance movement? How does reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the first edition, for which the placement of the illustrations was carefully planned by both John Tenniel and Lewis Carroll, influence the interpretation of the text? How do the binding, cover design, and decorations and illustrations by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon define Oscar Wilde’s A House of Pomegranates as a work of the Aesthetic movement and/or a collection of fairy tales?

Our illustrated tales

• John Ruskin and Richard Doyle, The King of the Golden River
• George Cruikshank, “Hop-o’my-Thumb and the Seven-League Boots” and “Cinderella and the Glass Slipper”
• Lewis Carroll and John Tenniel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Christina Rossetti and D. G. Rossetti, “Goblin Market”
• Christina Rossetti and Arthur Hughes, Speaking Likenesses
• George MacDonald and Arthur Hughes, “The Light Princess”
• Mary de Morgan and William de Morgan, “A Toy Princess”
• Mary de Morgan and Walter Crane, “The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde”
• Oscar Wilde, Walter Crane, and Jacomb Hood, “The Happy Prince”
• Oscar Wilde, Ricketts, and C. H. Shannon, “The Birthday of the Infanta”
• Evelyn Sharp and Mabel Dearmer, “The Boy who Looked Like a Girl”
• Kenneth Grahame, Maxfield Parrish, and E. H. Shepard, “The Reluctant Dragon”
• Nesbit and H. R. Millar, “The Prince, Two Mice, and Some Kitchen-Maids” and “Melisande: Or, Long and Short Division”

Links to digitized editions of our illustrated tales will be posted in UBC Library Online Course Reserves. If you would like to purchase a twenty-first-century edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with a helpful introduction and notes, I highly recommend the Broadview edition (print copy, eBook). The following editions are also excellent, though we will only be discussing a few of the tales that they include: George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin and Other Fairy Tales (Broadview); Oscar Wilde, The Complete Short Stories (Oxford World’s Classics); and Victorian Fairy Tales, edited by Michael Newton (Oxford World’s Classics).

Term 2
Online Asynchronous

Modernist Literature

Some descriptions of modernism are bloodless abstractions about formal experimentation, academic disruption, and modernist reaction against a too-rigid bourgeois 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 peoples, cultures and languages, and other places.

Topics include Decadence, the New Woman, Expressionism, Dada, Manifesto Modernism, New Objectivity, Impressionism, the Surreal and Psychoanalytic, Gesamtkunstwerk and Encyclopedism, Minimalism, Montage, Technological Moderns, Graphic Modernisms. Writers include Stein, H.D., Loy, Conrad, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, O’Casey, Beckett, Barnes, Stevens, Larsen, Rhys, others.

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

Fifty Years of U.S. Fiction

This course will immerse students in major U.S. novels of the 1970s to the 2020s, including some very recently published work. For an eclectic reading list our topics of interest will be likewise eclectic, but some subjects for examination will include the depth of racialized suffering in U.S. history; the legacy of wars and imperial struggle in Vietnam, Iraq, Hawaii, Philadelphia, and elsewhere; and the ongoing use of genres of the detective, the spy, the road, horror, and more. Texts likely to be included (subject to change): Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977); Tim O’Brien, Going After Cacciato (1979); Joan Didion, Democracy (1984); John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire (1990); Don DeLillo, Point Omega (2010); Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket (2025).

Term 2

MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

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 Playing in the Light, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness, Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Kopano Matlwa's Coconut and Sello Diuker’s Thirteen Cents.

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
• Vinh Nguyen, The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse
• Krys Lee, How I Became a North Korean

 Additional theoretical readings will be available via UBC Library.

Term 1

Online Asynchronous

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2
TTh, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Canadian Literature: Reading the Climate Emergency

Nature has always been at the core of Canadian artistic production. Over the past two hundred years, however, creative responses to the environment have changed dramatically. In the past few decades, with the increasing recognition of the climate emergency, artists are less apt to either passively address the land or render it sentimentally, and more apt to imagine an altered state of environmental change, even degradation. Contemporary writers often look at the effects of human interaction, resource extraction, and economic exploitation on Canadian land and waters. One strand of nature writing employs a poetics of warning as writers speculate on the effects of the tar sands on global warming, the relationships between Indigenous land claims and strip mining, the impacts of oil transportation on British Columbian riverbeds, or the consequences of the genetic modification of crop plants on prairie ecosystems. In parallel to the creative work, much scholarship has turned to discussions of human/non-human interaction, bioregional studies, postcolonial ecocriticism. In this course we will read critical work about the environment alongside fiction, poetry, drama, film, and visual art produced in Canada.

Term 2
TTh, 11:00 AM - 12:30 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 1
TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Stories in New Skins: Transformation, Adaptation, and Innovation in Indigenous Literatures

In Stories in a New Skin: Approaches to Inuit Literature, scholar Keavy Martin turns to a recurring trope of transformation in Inuit stories—humans and animals exchanging their skins— to conceptualize the inherent adaptability of Inuit intellectual traditions. This course, adapting Martin’s metaphor and extending its scope to a wide range of literary arts from northern Turtle Island (Canada), will examine a variety of Indigenous storytelling cultures through the prisms of transformation, adaptation, and innovation. Transformations are a prominent feature in many Indigenous cosmologies and narrative traditions, though our focus will not be (primarily) on instances of transformation within stories. Rather, this course will invite us to explore the political, cultural, and aesthetic questions that arise when we consider the various ways that Indigenous stories themselves are, or have been, transformed, adapted, and (re)published in new forms, genres, and media. How do stories change their “skins,” and why? What forces and motivations propel transformation or adaptation? The metaphor of changing skins is neither benign nor simply celebratory; it has complex ties to both renewal and violence, generative innovation and destructive disfiguration. On one hand, Canada’s literary and publishing history has often subjected Indigenous writers, texts, and knowledges to appropriation and harmful editing practices that have transformed or distorted Indigenous narratives to suit dominant ideals. On the other, and despite the eliminatory efforts of settler-colonialism—including its fictions that delimit “authentic” Indigenous cultures to a static, unchanged past—Indigenous literary artists continue to make tradition new, storying vibrant living cultures in diverse genres and technologies of representation.

With this ambivalence in mind, we’ll approach a historically and generically diverse selection of creation stories, orature, life-writing, fiction, poetry, animation, comics, film, and new media to consider the many new “skins” and remarkable breadth of contemporary Indigenous narrative traditions in Canada. From the publishing transformations of Maria Campbell’s pathclearing autobiography Halfbreed (1973) to the digital sci-fi retelling of the Haudenosaunee creation story in Skawennati’s “She Falls for Ages” (2017), our texts will prompt us to critically analyze, rigorously discuss, and creatively engage the possibilities and discomforts of transformation as stories adapt, write back, reimagine, and remediate Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures.

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

The description for this course is not yet available.

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

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Reading here and away together

This course builds student competencies in methods and practices of literary reading in conjunction with considerations of the situatedness of reading on the west coast of what is currently called Canada, in what is currently called BC and Vancouver, at UBC, and on unceded xwməθkwəy̓əm land. We will first develop theoretical vocabularies to aid us in reading “texts from elsewhere” in the context and setting of “here” and “texts from here.” We will consider a literary text from elsewhere in conjunction with a cluster of short texts by Musqueam and local Indigenous authors in dialogue with settler, diasporic, and Indigenous theories of mobilities, displacements, and understandings of place; continuing histories of settlement, colonization, dwelling, and survivance/surthrivance;relations among global and local spaces; and theories of power and its roles in, and in relation to, these topics. We will also theorize reading in dialogue with theories of reading that importantly complicate western European conceptions of what it means to read a “text” or a “book.” We will then turn to a selection of texts from elsewhere, closely reading these in conjunction with relevant learning resources local to UBC, to Musqueam, and to Vancouver and BC, including texts and learning materials from the Musqueam Nation. Our guiding questions will be: what does it, and what can it, mean, and do, to read, study, and research literature, here, at UBC and at Musqueam, and in the world? How can methods and practices of literary reading, here, best be put into dialogue with Indigenous, diasporic, and settler theories of place, emplacement, mobilities, and power, as well as practices of knowing and storying?

Online Asynchronous
Term 1

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 2

TTh, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Vampires Among Us

“But the Countess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming it. In her dream, she would like to be human; but she does not know if that is possible. The Tarot always shows the same configuration: always she turns up La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution.”  -- Angela Carter, “The Lady of the House of Love”

Despite their association with the Victorian Gothic and their implications of ancient lore, vampires’ longevity owes much to their enduring popularity, even among 21st century audiences. Their metaphorical possibilities remain vivid, potent, and diverse. When I decided to write a vampire novel, I set myself the limitations of its being contemporary in setting and secular in worldview, a narrative where its creatures of the night might manage to exist among mortals without being quite so obvious as in many tales of their doings. That process has inspired the basis of this course, where we will examine, in fiction and film, representations of vampires produced in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. While our texts might reference the famous vampire texts of the past (and even engage with characters from them), their worldview is arguably closer to ours, and their settings and characters more familiar to us.

The text list will involve 3-4 novels (possibly including but not limited to Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire; Kim Newman, Anno Dracula; Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, The Strain; and Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching), Angela Carter’s short story “The Lady of the House of Love” (from her collection The Bloody Chamber), and 1-2 films (again, likely chosen from though not necessarily limited to Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight; Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows; possibly even Ridley Scott’s Alien, which according to Daniel Pietersen’s “Spiders and Flies: The Gothic Monsters of Sci-Fi Horror”, is a vampire film owing much to Dracula). Our examination will be situated in critical and theoretical approaches to the Gothic as a contemporary area of representation.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a midterm essay and a term paper (both 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, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MWF, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Media Displacement

Foundational to the theory 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, digital nomadism, and the global history movement. The course will introduce students to the basic elements of media theory, and will develop the notion of a spatial methodology. The course concludes with student panel presentations on novels that explore the intersections of space, media, and displacement.

Term 1

TTh, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

Fantasy Fiction and History in British Children’s Literature

Term 1

T, 4:30 PM - 6:30 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 2

T, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Language, Nation & Colonization: the role of English

The languages of Europe’s nation states have not only been major vehicles of nation building but also of colonization. They are vehicles that exported and reified hegemonial perspectives. The connection of language and nation has indeed been so powerful that today we are still confronted with the legacies of late 18^th and early 19^th-century thinking in our conceptualizations of “language”. Which linguistic varieties are afforded and which denied the label “language” is not so much linguistically informed as socio-politically conditioned and here lingering colonial legacies loom large.

In this seminar we will study the roles of language in nation building and colonization, with special emphasis on the various instantiations of English. We will revisit the making of English as a national and imperial language, starting in Old English times and stretching all the way to the present. We will critically review the key achievements in the English language, such as Johnson’s dictionary, the prescriptive grammar tradition, the Oxford English Dictionary (Brewer 2007) or the Quirk et al. grammar (1985), and test their conceptualizations and presuppositions against notions that are associated with standard languages, such as homogeneity, superiority and purity.

We will see that, surprisingly, in some present-day approaches to language the discourses of hegemony still lurk in unsuspecting corners relating to what is perceived as a “legitimate” language and what not. It is safe to say that these discourses have left their mark on most if not all standard varieties, often via a stifling of Indigenous voices.

Class readings of selected papers to be forthcoming.

Deliverables:

• Response pieces to some readings
• Term paper on an aspect of English and nation making
• Oral presentation

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

Mad Science: Gothic Echoes in Passion Projects Gone Wrong

Over 40 years ago, Patrick Brantlinger argued in “The Gothic Origins of Science Fiction” that a problem in reading Science Fiction as “realistic prophecy … arises from the fact that the conventions of science fiction derive from the conventions of fantasy and romance, and especially from those of the Gothic romance. Science fiction grows out of literary forms that are antithetical to realism.” More recently, two 2019 essays by Daniel Pietersen on Sublime Horror (republished on his own site), “The universe is a haunted house – the Gothic roots of science fiction” and “Spiders and flies – the Gothic monsters of sci-fi horror,” explore the intersection of terror and horror tropes in what we can only call Gothic Science Fiction. This course is not about slick shiny optimistic visions of the future; it’s not about bold exploration conducted aboard pristine spaceships by intrepid explorers wearing silver jumpsuits with diagonal zippers. It’s not about scientific research that has vastly benefitted worlds and their inhabitants: it’s about bizarre singular passion projects and their progeny, about science gone wrong, about the byways of pseudoscience.

We will examine the theoretical bases of contemporary approaches to the Gothic as well as to Science Fiction and apply them to various examples of fiction and film. Core texts tentatively include Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 edition); Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Alien (dir. Ridley Scott), plus 1-2 other short novels and 1-2 other films (I will have the text list finalized by mid-June).

Evaluation will be based on a presentation and its revised report, a presentation response and its report; a term paper; a final reflection essay to be written during the exam period, and participation in discussion.

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

Term 2

W, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

“Yes, I have read James Joyce’s Ulysses.” Let’s just admit this seminar is for a lifetime’s worth of bragging rights, but also because I know you will discover what fun it is to read and understand Joyce’s great book. It’s daunting, clever, about everything and nothing, completely frank, silly, shocking, obscene, intellectual, and really, really funny. Do you care about other people and enjoy their variety? Do you wonder about the universe? Do you like to try to make some sense out of a chaotic and often tragic world? Do you enjoy wordplay, puzzles, and games? Then Ulysses is for you! This is the book you’ll never forget reading… but it’s nice to have a guide along with you the first time you read it.

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 Jackie Kay’s “Would Jane Eyre Come to the Information Desk?,” 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 KC Oster’s graphic novel Rabbit Chase, and the “Alice industry.”

We will be discussing Jane Eyre in its entirety during our second (September 11th) class. Please begin reading before term begins.

Our reading and viewing list will include:

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World’s Classics); extracts from Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Canvas); Jane Eyre, devised by the Company and directed by Sally Cookson, 2015 (Drama Online, UBC Library); Jackie Kay, “Would Jane Eyre Come to the Information Desk?” (UBC Library and reading by Kay); 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 print edition, eBook); Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney, 1951 (UBC Library); Alice in Wonderland, directed by Jonathan Miller, 1966 (Canvas); Elizabeth LaPensée and K.C. Oster, Rabbit Chase (Annick Press).

Term 2

M, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

T, 2:30 PM - 4:30 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 2

W, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Writing the Self

This seminar is organized around the theme of the self: Self-making, self-deception, self-reliance, self-expression, self-representation, self-liberation 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 an early US philosopher (Emerson); lyric (self-expressive) poetry by Whitman and Dickinson; and life writing by a formerly enslaved woman (Jacobs) and the first Asian American author (Sui Sin Far). The course will wrap up with an experimental novel written by 13 contributors who together confront the American mythology of self-making and the idea of self-expression through voting OR a recent biography of five generations of a Chinese American family.

Texts may include:

• Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1455539741 (available at bookstore or on amazon.ca) OR a print-out of the lyrics (on CANVAS)
• Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Experience”  on CANVAS
• Selections from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself on CANVAS
• Selections from Henry David Thoreau’s memoir, Walden (1854) (Princeton UP) 9780691169347
• Herman Melville’s novella, Benito Cereno (1852) in Billy Budd, Bartleby , and Other Stories ed. Peter Coviello (Penguin) ISBN 978-0143107606
• Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) ed. Koritha Mitchell, Broadview P, ISBN 9781554815029
• Selections from Sui Sin Far’s works on CANVAS (I will try to upload original PDF and a word doc)
• Elizabeth Jordan’s ed. Composite novel The Sturdy Oak (1917) OR Ava Chin, Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming (2023)

Term 2

R, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Censorship and Speech in Contemporary Canadian Literature

“Artists have voices,” author Lawrence Hill states in an interview, “and their voices can help influence—profoundly, sometimes—the way we see ourselves, and the way we see our country and the world and our roles in them.” In this class we will turn to a series of questions I keep coming back to: Who speaks? Who gets a chance to speak? Whose voices are heard? Who listens? Who is listening? Who is silenced? Who chooses to be silent? Who profits from speaking? Who benefits? Thinking about censorship, freedom of speech, and creative activism, we will study a selection of fiction and poetry published in Canada that reflects on a wide range of topics and issues, including the climate crisis, race and racism, mobility and migration, decolonization, gender, sexuality, technology, and history. These writers tell stories where private lives and public histories often merge. We will examine the intersections of politics and art in texts from a range of geographies, genres, and cultures.  These might include a graphic novel “Haida Manga,” a book of poetry that reflects on the Rwandian genocide, a collection of short stories about a Laotian family new to Canada, a novel that time travels between the west coast of Canada and Japan, a narrative about the legacy of violence for a family in Ontario, and a novel about a friendship between a song writer and an internet cover artist.  This course will centre the voices of BIPOC writers.

Term 1

T, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Othello and Black Reimaginings

Of Shakespeare’s works, none has sparked the imagination, interest, and ire of Black people more than Othello. This seminar will begin with an intensive study of Othello, reading it within the context of early modern concerns about race, religion, gender, sexuality, and social rank. We will then examine how Black actors, authors, artists, and critics have reimagined Shakespeare’s play to advance their political, artistic, and intellectual projects. We will analyze landmark performances by Black actors (Ira Aldridge, Paul Robeson, and James Earl Jones), Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet, Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor, Stew’s Passing Strange, Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Rita Dove’s Sonata Mulattica, Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello, and work by the visual artists Fred Wilson, Curlee Raven Holton, and Chris Ofili. Class assignments will include short papers, a group-presentation, and a research-based final project.

Term 1

W, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM

Translation, Multilingualism, Poetics: Theory and Practice in Jewish and Muslim Diasporas

Above all else, my languages release me without losing me.   --–from Samira Negrouche, “Who is Speaking,” trans. Marilyn Hacker

In this senior seminar, we will explore the theory and practice of diasporic poetics and of literary translation. Contemporary literature and translation from the Jewish and Islamic diasporas, and in particular literature that weaves intimacies between traditions, will be our central but not solo focus. We will linger on translated and multilingual literature and on the experimental, erotic, political, queer, feminist, and strange. We will also look at sources: Qur’an, Talmud, medieval poetry, visual art. Assigned reading will likely include work by Rahat Kurd, Denis Ferhatovic, Joyce Mansour, Celia Dropkin, Marilyn Hacker, Samira Negrouche, Mohja Kahf, Ozan Zakariya Keskinkılıç, Jennifer Croft, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Lawrence Venuti, Jhumpa Lahiri, Suneela Mubayi, David Gramling, and others. Poets and translators will visit the classroom, and students will have the opportunity to practice poetic or prose translation for their final projects.

Term 1

R, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Postcolonial Literature

This course introduces students to the work of authors from formerly colonized nations in the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia. Focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on prose fiction, we will examine how postcolonial writers engage with issues of national identity and decolonization; negotiate the competing imperatives of English and vernacular literary traditions; and formulate both personal and collective strategies of self-representation. Possible writers include V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Conrad, Jamaica Kincaid, Ayi Kwei Armah, Titsi Dangarembga, and Wole Soyinka.

This is a reading intensive course, with approximately 200-250 pages of primary and secondary materials a week. Complete the readings before class and come prepared to discuss them with the group.

Required texts (on order at the UBC Bookstore): 

• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
• Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
• Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
• V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River 
• Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
• J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life
• Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
• Wole Soyinka, Death and the King’s Horseman
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Weep Not, Child

Term 2
T, 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Scottish Romanticism

No country exudes the “Romantic” more than Scotland. Its gothic castles, sublime mountain ranges, and thrilling coastal vistas were all seminal to the formation of a Romantic mode in art, music, and literature. Scotland’s complex history—its divisions between Gaelic and English-speaking communities, its religious contentions and civil wars, its experiments with agricultural improvement and internal colonialism, even its status as a country (nation? region?)—was a subject of many works of poetry, drama, and fiction in the period and has been central to conversations about eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature ever since. In this seminar, we will consider these issues by way of a selection of key texts by canonical Scottish Romantic authors (James MacPherson, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, James Hogg) as well as by lesser known, but critically important writers, especially women (incl. Anne Grant, Joanna Baillie, Mary Brunton, and Susan Ferrier). Our goals will be to understand how Scotland helped to define the movement we call “Romanticism” and to see how Scottish Romantic literature unpacks in sometimes odd ways the formative social and political transformations that were taking place in Scotland and Great Britain at the time—transformations that still have repercussions today. We will also think about how Scottish Romanticism has influenced the aesthetics and politics of other nations, including Canada and particularly British Columbia.

Term 2

R, 9:30 AM - 11:30 AM

The Asian Inhuman

This course will examine the figure of the Asian as inhuman in contemporary literature and culture. It will draw on a body of creative and critical texts that address this figure in terms of techno-Orientalism; human rights discourse; race, migration and diaspora; gender and sexuality; migrant labour; and refugeeism.

Creative Texts: (Subject to Change)

• Han Kang, The Vegetarian.
• SKY Lee. Disappearing Moon Cafe.
• Blaine Harden. Escape From Camp 14.
• Kazuo Ishiguro. Never Let Me Go.
• Y-Dang Troeung. Landbridge.

There will also be a course packet with critical readings from critical refugee studies, critical Cold War studies, Asian diaspora and migration, on techno-Orientalism, and Asian Canadian and Asian American studies.

Term 2
Wednesday, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Term 2

F, 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Twenty-First Century U.S. Fiction

This seminar will examine U.S. fiction (novels and short story collections) of the first twenty-plus 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 (subject to change): 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) or A Gesture Life (1999); short stories by John Edgar Wideman; and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). Some critical and theoretical texts will be included as well.