NOTE: Schedule subject to change
As of January 20, 2026
Term 2
MON & WED, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
This section of English 100 will introduce students to fundamental research questions in the literary disciplines by reading texts that dramatize the politics of representation in cross-cultural situations. Topics will range from the discovery of the “New World” to modern colonization and contemporary issues of migration and asylum. Primary texts will include William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains. These will be read alongside scholarly examples of literary theory, rhetoric, composition theory, philosophy, and postcolonial theory. Students will learn how to participate in the scholarly controversies that comprise the dynamic conversations of the university research community.
Points of (Literary) Connection
“an ocean and half a continent away from home, a drenching heat stirs rivers within me” - Haunani-Kay Trask (Hawaiian) “Returning the Gift”
Term 1
MON & WED, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
What kinds of connections are described and enacted in creative literary texts? What can we learn about connection, and its limits and possibilities, from reading? What links between texts, writers and sites become visible when look for them? How do some writers invite us to notice connections between places and issues we usually think about separately? Mostly (but not only) engaging Indigenous texts from around the world, in this course we will think together about some of the different forms that connection can take: literary map-making, creative collaborations, collections and networks, solidarities, and links between writing and other arts. In this course, we will read a range of poetry and short fiction, take a deep dive into Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s poetry collection Iep Jāltok, visit some artworks on campus, and grapple with critical writing about how to read different forms, sites and histories of (literary) connection.
Term 1
TUE & THU, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
This course introduces students to the analytical skills and critical thinking essential to university-level literary reading, thinking and writing. Students will pursue hands-on practice of methods of literary analysis. Although we will write essays, 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. There will be a midterm, a Term Paper, a Final Examination and some group projects that require both research and out-of-the box thinking. What will we read? We will look at some texts on monsters and the monstrous, which will include 2 novels, including The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Graveyard Book, a play version of one of the novels, and some short works. And remember: UBC Law, Medicine, Dentistry, Pharmacy, and Education all require 6 credits of first year English, so 110 will prepare you for lots of future paths!
Literary Monsters and Monstrous Literature
Rey: “You are a monster.”
Kylo Ren: “Yes, I am.”
– Star Wars: The Last Jedi
“Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world” – Richard III 1.i
Term 2
TUE & THU, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
What is a monster? We know monsters from myths and legends, folktales, horror fiction and film. We know their variety: the grotesque, the beautiful, the terrifying, the pitiable, the sports of nature and the forces of evil. Dragons, werewolves, vampires, zombies, Frankenstein’s Creature, Dorian Gray, the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Marisa Coulter, many of the characters in The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones: they’re everywhere, from under the bed to the house next door to the battlefield, and right into a great deal of literature. Which leaves us here: in this section of 110 we’ll focus on how literary texts \use representations of monstrosity in ways that inspire both terror and horror, as well as (let’s be honest) fascination and even enjoyment.
We’ll start with William Shakespeare’s Richard III (a play that meditates on villainy and ambition in demonizing its subject for Tudor audiences, yet still fascinates contemporary ones) and at Ian McKellen’s 1995 film adaptation, which shifts the setting to an alternate-reality 1930s England where fascism takes hold. We will also consider various stage and screen adaptations as approaches to the play, including recent ones using race and gender-diverse casting, and sometimes featuring as Richard actors who are themselves physically disabled or disfigured. Other core texts include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There might be one or two short additional texts (such as Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”, as an introduction to the monologue form, to iambic pentameter, and to monstrosity).
Your writing assignments in this course (two essays and a final exam) will develop skills in both critical thinking and university-level literary textual analysis, and both are much more generally useful and applicable than you might think. I hope there will also be a lot of lively discussion, both in class and on our Canvas site.
Term 2
MON & WED, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Why has the bildungsroman, the coming-of-age narrative, been such a dominant part of post-independence African writing? Do children witness large-scale social changes in radically new ways? What does the genre tell us about the pressures shaping young African subjects? And what possibilities might the genre allow for?
In this course we’ll turn to a range of texts from the African continent that explore the complexities of growing up in rapidly changing societies. From Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions to the darkly comic Zambian film I Am Not a Witch, we’ll encounter a wide range of stories that challenge the idea of what “growing up” means on the world’s “youngest” continent.
Storying Place: Introduction to Reading Place and Power in Vancouver and BC
Term 2
TUE & THU, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Note: 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 in this summer course by reading a variety of local literatures, looking to such narrative forms as short stories, novels, poetry, creative non-fiction, speculative fiction, and digital media. You will be invited to visit and interact with local places addressed by our texts, and if possible we will take advantage of the summer weather to make one or more class field trips to locations in Vancouver. Assignments will encourage you to understand yourself as variously “inside” the stories of place we study, enabling students to not only analyze place-based texts, but also engage with creative modes of inquiry inspired by your own relations to the course materials.
Term 1
MON & WED, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
In comics and graphic novels, the blank space between panels is called the “gutter.” It seems that nothing happens here; that there is an absence of meaning. It is the gutter, however, that demands the reader participate in constructing the story and its interpretations. Its blankness provides space for individual imagination. In a different sense of the gutter, it is a place where we expect to find trash, waste, or run-off, things that don’t belong to an idealized world. Until recently, graphic narratives occupied a cultural gutter, widely perceived as aesthetic run-off on its way to — or already in — the sewers.
This course pursues interpretive possibilities in both directions suggested by these understandings of the gutter. We will embrace graphic novels and comic books, shorts, and strips as combinations of text, image, and absence that offer unique, transformative opportunities for communication, empathy, and symbolism. We will survey the history of the production and reception of graphic narrative, tracking its development from the margins of the funny pages to a multi-billion dollar industry that transcends genres and includes some of the most thoughtful, serious literary texts of our time. We will read Alan Moore’s Watchmen, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, Shaun Tan’s Arrival, Ram V’s Many Deaths of Laila Starr, Will Eisner from Conversations with God, selections from the Moonshot collection of Indigenous graphic narrative, and Christopher Claremont’s X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills. What unique perspectives do these graphic narratives offer? How does the combination of image and text differently represent questions of identity and experience? What can be read in the bathetic contrast between panels depicting superheroes and cartoon animals and the infinite spaces of non-happening and un-meaning between them?
Term 1 - 2
Online, asynchronous
This online, asynchronous course explores and examines contemporary English phonology, morphology, parts of speech, and lexical (word) meaning. We begin with the study of distinct speech sounds and possible sound combinations in English. Students will study the International Phonetic Alphabet as it applies to current varieties of English. Next, we study the processes of word formation and word classification in English. We then study word meaning (lexical semantics) using a variety of approaches. The course is offered from a descriptive perspective and is not focused exclusively on any specific linguistic theory. There are three collaborative assignments, five quizzes, graded discussions for each module and a final exam.
Students will be working fully online on all the course work. There are Zoom meetings and recorded lectures at regular intervals. The final exam is online. Zoom office hours are by appointment.
Required reading:
Brinton, Laurel J. and Donna M. Brinton. The Linguistic Structure of Modern English. John Benjamins, 2010. ISBN 978 90 272 1172 9.
"Author's pen" and "actor's voice": Shakespeare in Text and Performance
Term 1 - 2
Online, asynchronous
This course will explore the extent to which we as readers of Shakespeare’s tragedies, histories, and comedies can remain engaged with his plays’ potential for realization onstage, in performance. Part of our focus will be historicist: we will consider the institutional and social conditions attendant upon the original productions of the plays, as well as the ways in which the plays themselves dramatize matters of affect and spectatorship. Our work will also explore the formal dramaturgy of the plays in order to think about how the texts register the nuance of performance in obvious ways (in stage directions and dialogue) and by appealing to the senses and to the emotions of a live audience. We will also look at the editing, printing, and publishing of the plays in order to think about how the page simultaneously encodes and distorts performance for modern readers. Whenever possible, we will consider the performance history of the plays, with a particular emphasis on how modern adaptations for the stage make use of (cut, modify, rearrange, reimagine) the playtext.
The Haunted Landscapes of Gothic Modern
Term 1
TUE & THU, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
“in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought” – Mrs. Dalloway
Modernism was born out of seismic, revolutionary shifts in society and culture. World wars, political revolutions in Europe and beyond, murderous civil and colonial/imperial wars, economic depression, and successive waves of technological modernization offering mixed psychological and social benefits and injuries laid siege to assumptions that the world was in any way well-ordered or reliably understood. Its literature both reflects conscious innovation and experiment and sometimes opposes these passions for change. Its obsessions respond in complex ways to those seismic shifts in its representations of gender and sexuality, social structures, race and culture, in all cases often in terms of transgression. And yet, in its drive to make things new, Modernist literature is often a haunted place: spectres of ancestry, of war, of places escaped from collide with the present moment, creating a dark, Gothic modernity. This troubled place will be our focus.
Assignments will include a midterm essay and a term paper (both requiring secondary academic research), as well as a final reflection essay to be written during the exam period.
Course texts include Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Broadview); Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison; D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; James Joyce, “The Dead”; Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude” and “At the Bay”. I strongly recommend getting ahead with the reading, especially of longer texts such as Women in Love.
"And the winner is...!": Canada's Literary Prize Culture
Term 2
MON & WED, 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM
“In short, prizes matter. . .With only an appearance on . . . [a] shortlist, a book moves from total obscurity in the classroom and pages of literary criticism to respectable showings in both—and it gets a healthy popularity boost along the way.”
- Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath & J.D. Porter
In this class, we will study the five fictional works short-listed for the 2025 Atwood-Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize: We, The Kindling by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Graveyard Shift at the Lemonade Stand by Tim Bowling, Endling by Maria Reva, Simple Creatures by Robert McGill and Julius Julius by Aurora Stewart de Peña. We will begin by considering both ideological and institutional components of literary prizes (including evaluation criteria, selection of judges, and procedures for submission) as well as what Manshall, McGrath & Porter refer to as the “consecrating forces and actors” which influence literary awards. In addition to writing a critical essay on one of the texts, students will participate as a jury member in an in-house “Fiction 2025” award committee to choose their own winner from the 2025 Writers' Trust Fiction shortlist.
If you’re interested in recent fiction, the exigencies of literary prizes, evaluating contemporary texts, and current directions in Canadian literature, then this is the course for you!
Term 2
WED & FRI, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
The material book: history and networks, 1780s-1890s
This seminar places the material book in the context of its networks of raw materials, with a focus on linen, lead, trees, insects, leather, and bone and their entanglement with histories of emerging capitalism and financial exchange, maritime, riparian, and overland transport, chattel slavery and the traffic in enslaved people, "exploration," extraction, and settlement. Discussions will emphasize the English-language codex of Britain and America and the more expansively defined and/or non-codex books of Nuu-chah-nulth, Lakota, Haudenosaunee, and Cherokee nations/peoples. Assignments will be sequenced, including a theory or history presentation and handout, a research abstract, and an annotated bibliography, building toward the design and completion of individual projects investigating and contextualizing in historical and spatial relations the materials and making of a book (codex or otherwise) or related grouping of books of each student's choice. There will be opportunities for hands-on work with materials in Rare Books and Special Collections and the Museum of Anthropology. There will also be opportunities to gain practical experience in making the material book (binding, ink- and paper-making, letterpress) if seminar members desire.
Readings will include Senchyne, The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2020); Barnes and Goodman, American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (Univ of Pennsylvania Press, 2024); Skeehan, Fabric of Empire: Material and Literary Cultures of the Global Atlantic (Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 2020); Wisecup, Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale Univ Press, 2021) and "Toward a Bibliography of Birch Bark," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 117, no 4 (2023); Duffek, McLennan, and Wilson, Where the Power is: Indigenous Perspectives on Northwest Coast Art (Museum of Anthropology/Figure One, 2021); Marie Battiste, "Print Culture and Decolonizing the University," in Decolonizing the Page (Univ of Toronto Press, 2004); shorter works on specific materials and networks. Historical texts will include James Cook, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London, 1784); Olaudah Equiano, Interesting Narrative of the Life (1789); Anna Barbauld, Evenings at Home (1792-96); William Wordsworth, The 1805 Prelude (selected books); Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814); Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897); Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987); Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust (1991); others TBA.
Postcolonial Auto/Mobility
Term 1
TUE & THU, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Since the scholarship on automobility emerged in the field of sociology, its key claims have paid keen attention to the infrastructural networks in which the automobile is embedded. However, sociological examinations have in the same vein given short shrift to the postcolonial. This seminar takes this limitation of the sociological debate on automobility as a point of departure for reading postcolonial automobility in literary and cultural texts. In this course, we will commence from two central claims: the first, the entire world as we know it is postcolonial; and the second, the term “automobility” is a misnomer for what it purports to name. We will start by exploring automobility as a form that we can read across spaces—from Vancouver to New York to Jakarta to Lagos. In doing so, we will consider the term postcolonial and ask ourselves what it means to think of our world as we know it as postcolonial and of ourselves as postcolonial subjects. We shall apply our answers to these questions to rigorous discussions of instances of the automobile in postcolonial texts, with particular attention to Africa. Africa is particularly cogent for this reading because it challenges any simplistic understanding of automobility. Through novels, plays, poetry, and films, we will consider Africa’s automobile network of road, spatiality, coloniality, infrastructure, motor vehicle, and oil and the corollary effects of all this on the artistic imaginations of African cultural producers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In short, this course considers the keyword “automobility” as an entry point to unpacking the connections between literature and infrastructure.