2026 Winter Session

Term 1
MWF, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

The Unruly Self in Literature and Culture

Poems about identity and race by Philip Larkin and Natasha Trethewey, fiction by Ralph Ellison about a segregated U.S. filled with racial tensions, 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 (both in-class and at home) 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
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 literature, listening the music, and watching film. These sessions will focus on key texts that take up Black sound. Black sound is a conceptual framing that considers how sound, noise, speech, and music have shaped Black life. Blackness has its own sound and Black diasporic writers, artists, and performers have mobilized the aesthetic devices of noise and sound to do the work of living and resisting. In this course, we turn our attentions towards various genres of Black sound and its manifestations in literature, performance, film, and more. Some texts may include Beyonce’s Lemonade, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, M.A.A.D City, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, among others.

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, film, and music and scholarly criticism, while developing their skills as scholarly 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 can expect to write weekly responses, short essays, and a term paper requiring secondary research.

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

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.

Are they "mad"? Or just neurodivergent?:

Fragmented Identities from Frankenstein to Freshwater

This section of English 100 will explore representations of madness and multifaceted identities in a range of diverse texts: two novels (Frankenstein and Freshwater), two short stories ("The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Yellow Wallpaper") and several of Sylvia Plath's poems. 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, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Why Fairy Tales Still Matter

When Greta Thunberg spoke of fairy tales at the UN Climate Action Summit, she used the term in a way that dates to at least the 1740s—to refer to a deceptive, idealized fantasy that ignores the harsher realities of life. But is that characterization entirely fair? And what, exactly, is a fairy tale? Why do some remain popular even two or three hundred years after they were first published? And why do modern writers so often return to the form, sometimes to rewrite old tales and sometimes to compose brand-new ones? In this course, we will address these questions by reading and discussing a variety of classic tales by the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont as well as modern versions of those tales by Emma Donoghue, Francesca Lia Block, and Donna Jo Napoli. We’ll end the term by examining a graphic novel by Bill Willingham in which fairy tale characters figure prominently. In lectures and discussions, we’ll consider how fairy tales have been adapted to meet the needs of different historical periods, and how different critical approaches to the same text can yield entirely different—even competing—interpretations.

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

The description for this course is not yet available.

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

MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Practicing the Humanities

Writing by hand, sitting (or standing) and reading, finding a physical book in a library, attending a film screening, debating face to face, opening a dictionary, speaking a new language, or translating between two people: these are all embodied and sometimes uncomfortable practices that put us into relationship with language, art, and one another. In this class, we will actively practice the humanities, and consider why so many people have given so much, and often in such dangerous and uncertain circumstances, to the practice literature, film, and art. Questions of linguistic difference, labor, and differential access will be at the forefront of our discussions. Expect to attend events outside of class and to discuss racialization and colonialism, queerness and trans/gender, and disability. This is a good course for people who write creatively, have another creative practice, or who speak or study more than one language.

Term 1

MWF, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Genres of Indigeneity 

ENGL 100 is a writing-intensive introduction to the disciplines of literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. The course 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, drama, film, and other modes of resurgent cultural expression. In doing so, ENGL 100 will consider the literary, geographic, political, historical, racial, economic and social processes that have facilitated the contexts and content of authorship and text in Indigenous literary studies broadly speaking. What do these literary forms tell us about “Indigeneity,” and what is set into motion by the interaction of this modifier with “literature”? What does Indigenous literature tell “us” about the form of the settler nation states and Indigenous nations and their citizens in the present day? What does a study of literature have to do with answering questions about nationhood, identity, community, and citizenship? Why does it matter? In attempting to answer these (and other) questions, we will remain committed to the complexities of audience and reception, genre, authorship, and the present and future of Indigenous literary studies.

Term 1

TR, 9:30 AM - 11:00 AM

African Stories

This class is an invitation to feast on the literary. Drawing on stories from Africa in different forms, we will consider the nature of African stories and the art of the African storyteller. We will pursue questions such as: What do African stories tell us about the world? What informs the art of the African storyteller? How do African stories interact with other storytelling traditions? How do African storytellers react to the world in which they live? Starting with African folktales, from among the Akan people of Ghana to the Yoruba people of Nigeria, we will work our way to some African classics such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy. This will be a multi-genre study of African stories, so prepare to interact with African folktales, novels, and film.

This is a writing-intensive course. As such, you will complete weekly reading responses, do some in-class journaling, and submit a final creative project.

Term 1

TR, 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

African Stories

This class is an invitation to feast on the literary. Drawing on stories from Africa in different forms, we will consider the nature of African stories and the art of the African storyteller. We will pursue questions such as: What do African stories tell us about the world? What informs the art of the African storyteller? How do African stories interact with other storytelling traditions? How do African storytellers react to the world in which they live? Starting with African folktales, from among the Akan people of Ghana to the Yoruba people of Nigeria, we will work our way to some African classics such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy. This will be a multi-genre study of African stories, so prepare to interact with African folktales, novels, and film.

This is a writing-intensive course. As such, you will complete weekly reading responses, do some in-class journaling, and submit a final creative project.

Term 1

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 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, September 22nd (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%
• three in-class essays - 15% each
• Canvas Discussions post (4%) and reply (1%) - 5%
• final exam - 30%

Our texts:

You are strongly encouraged to read print editions when possible because reading print helps you to read deeply; however, if you need to read digital editions for accessibility reasons, you may read the authorized eBook versions of the print editions listed below.

Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (Vintage); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview); 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 KC 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); a selection of poems (all available online) by Sarah Howe, Theresa Muñoz, and Alice Te Punga Somerville.

Term 1

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

Literature and (Re)Creation

Literature is a powerful mechanism for (re)creation. Reading literature can be a recreational activity 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 images, non-fiction, poems, films, stories, and plays engage in and with (re)creation: how they depict recreation, people (re)creating themselves, and people (re)creating the world. After some introductory matters, we will work through a unit called “Just Nature” (a collaborative ecojustice learning project with 5 academic institutions), and then examine Ryan Coogler's Black Panter, Octavia E Butler’s Blood Child and Other Stories, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and “Body Snatchers”, Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful, and William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

This is a writing-intensive course, which means you will do a lot of writing, both formal and informal.

Term 1

TR, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2
MWF, 9:00 PM - 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.

Are they "mad"? Or just neurodivergent?:

Fragmented Identities from Frankenstein to Freshwater

This section of English 100 will explore representations of madness and multifaceted identities in a range of diverse texts: two novels (Frankenstein and Freshwater), two short stories ("The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Yellow Wallpaper") and several of Sylvia Plath's poems. 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 2
MWF, 10:00 PM - 11:00 AM

Books and Friendship

Aristotle says, “Without friends no one would choose to live, though they had all other goods.” Friendship is supposed to exist upon a principle of perfect equality. It promises a private intimacy free from masquerade and convention; only a friend knows and loves your “true portrait,” proposes Montaigne. But what would a cultural history of friendship show? Is modern friendship a different kind of thing than friendships in the past? Could you have a friend at first sight, or only briefly, or must a friendship be built with labour over time? Can friendship be erotic or romantic? What changes when friendship occurs among a group? This course thinks about “two [or more] going together,” exemplary and distinctive friendships in fiction, in drama, in poetry, in life.  We consider topics including friends as companions, friends and self-growth, friendships with animals, philosophy of friendship, heroic friendships, queer and romantic friendships, friendship and the nation, doomed and difficult friendships.

We will discover multiple answers to our 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, focalization, and setting. Writers may include Ursula Le Guin, Nella Larsen, Samuel Beckett, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Kazuo Ishiguro, or others.

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

Poetry, Plays, Prose

This course is designed for students interested in the discipline of English literary studies and aims to cultivate in students the practice of reading and writing about literary texts. We will cover the basic concepts and vocabularies of literary criticism, and familiarize ourselves with the central forms and genres of literature—poetry, plays, and prose—and the specific methods involved in analyzing them. We will ask not just what the meaning of a literary work is, but how meaning is conveyed, and why it is conveyed in such a way. That is to say, we will look at the formal elements of a text and the way they interact with, reinforce, or subvert a text’s thematic content. Additionally, we will learn about the conventions of essay writing and how to write good prose. Texts to be studied include a variety of poems, William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and Titus Andronicus; Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan, and Nella Larsen’s Passing.

Term 2
MWF, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Writing in an Age of AI

What does it mean to “write with AI?” What does artificial intelligence offer our writing practices? What does it obstruct or challenge? And why does it matter? In this course, designed to introduce students to a range of academic and professional genres of writing, we will engage directly with AI technologies, examining not only what they do on the page but also how they contribute to broader intellectual and ethical questions around thinking, creating, and communicating. Built for students who love using AI, students who hate it, and students are scared or confused by it, this course will both prepare you for college-level writing and help you to define what it means to be a writer.

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

Authors to be studied may include Ernest Hemingway, Kate Chopin, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sylvia Plath, Willa Cather, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Roland Barthes, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, William Faulkner, Sophocles, and others.

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. 100% attendance is expected, attendance will be taken, and the final mark will be adjusted accordingly.

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

“And what is the reason?”

“Do you not see the reason for yourself?” (Melville, "Bartleby").

Term 2
MWF, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Writing the Self

This course is a writing-intensive introduction to literary study recommended for students considering English as a major. The focus of this particular section of the course will be 19^th and 20^th-century North American literature. Our theme is the self, a concept that we will explore by reading texts in a variety of genres (memoirs, essays, biography, lyric poetry) that address self-making, self-deception, self-reliance, self-expression, self-representation, etc. We 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; the libretto provides two versions of Hamilton: the biography narrated by his nemesis Aaron Burr and the autobiography promoted by Hamilton himself. We will then read life writing by a formerly enslaved person (Harriet Jacobs) and the first Asian American author (Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton); essays about self-reliance by an early environmentalist (Henry David Thoreau) and a nineteenth-century US philosopher (Emerson); and lyric (self-expressive) poetry by Whitman and Dickinson. Students will read and report on works of contemporary life writing and have a chance to write a micro-memoir as one of their final assignments.

Texts may include:

• Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter, Hamilton: The Revolution 
• Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841)
• Selections from Walt Whitman’sSong of Myself
• Emily Dickinson’s selected poems
• Excerpts from Henry David Thoreau’s memoir, Walden (1854)
• Harriet Jacobs’ autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl(1861)
• Sui Sin Far’s memoir, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” (1909)
• Elizabeth Jordan’s ed. Composite novel The Sturdy Oak(1917)
• Ava Chin, Mott Street: A Chinese American Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming (2023)

Term 2
MWF, 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2
MWF, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

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

Making Trouble

We live in troubled and troubling times; our life-worlds are often characterized by disenfranchisement, social unease, and anxiety. Media and the literary arts represent that trouble, but also engage with it, whether to provoke or to ameliorate, to confront or to repair. In this section of English 100, we will read work that challenges our senses of self-understanding and of belonging in the contemporary world. How and what do we learn from texts that resist easy interpretation, or that articulate a staunch refusal to accept the terms and conditions of their given place? How do we make art in the wake of catastrophe and disaster? What are the risks and benefits of what the cultural and media theorist Donna Haraway has called "staying with the trouble"? In this section of English 100, we will examine the challenging work of five writers and one filmmaker (Gwendolyn Brooks, Kathleen Jamie, Kate Beaton, Alice Munro, Claudia Rankine, and Alanis Obomsawin) to begin to think through the imperatives offered by unsettling, resistant, resilient, troubling art.

Students should be cautioned that the works on this course syllabus confront sexual violence, misogyny, racism, settler colonialism, national and class prejudice, suicidal ideation, and other troubling—and very real—issues; you should be prepared to be challenged and creatively disturbed by what you read and witness.

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

Breaking apart, bringing together: techniques of criticism

This course offers an introduction to techniques of literary criticism. Our emphasis will be on skills and craft, paying particular attention both to analysis (breaking up, loosening, moving from complex wholes to simpler parts) and to synthesis (putting together, assembling, combining or composing). The primary objects of our critical attention will be classic works of literature as well as modern and contemporary ones: Aristotle's Poetics, an enormously influential book of literary criticism which offers some fundamental terms for our course (mimesis, plot, catharsis, techne, and others); Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound, an ancient Greek tragedy that describes the fate of the god Prometheus punished by Zeus for teaching humans how to use fire and other basic arts; some remarkable poetry by Emily Dickinson; possibly, Bertolt Brecht's Life of Galilieo which examines the revolutionary possibilities of knowledge; and a novel (TBD). We will think about these works in their critical, historical, and theoretical contexts, and read selected secondary sources. Where relevant, we may include film and/or television treatments that offer distinctive media interpretations of the primary works. 

The learning objectives of this course include: 

• to familiarize students with a vocabulary of criticism
• to give students practical experience with analytical tools such as the reading response, the summary, the bibliography, and the critical question
• to build student confidence to writea research paper that synthesizes ideas from other sources and crafts an original argument of their own 

The course will be taught as a mix of lecture, discussion, in-class exercises, and group work. 

There will be a writing textbook as well as other required readings and viewings for this course. Please note, students will be required to complete the reading (or viewing) for a given class meeting before class so that they are prepared to engage in lively discussion.  

Term 2

TR, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Dog Tales

Under the writing intensive rubric of this course, we will study tales of dogs. Our readings will include a canine biography by Virginia Woolf, a harrowing hurricane novel by Jesmyn Ward, and a “supernatural” thriller by Arthur Conan Doyle. We’ll supplement these literary texts with critical writings by Ackerly, Boisseron, Haraway, and Weaver, and with the film Best in Show (2000) in honour of the late Catherine O’Hara. In these artefacts, dogs are dogs, but they’re always something else, too – creatures (Canis familiaris) for talking about family, poverty, race, gender, violence, and sexuality in human communities.

Students need not be “dog people” to succeed in this course. They need to complete a midterm, final exam, and multiple shorter writing assignments that lead to a longer term paper.

Term 2

TR, 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 1

MW, 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM

Identity and Identification in Literary Texts

How do we define ourselves – as Canadians, as artists, as lovers, as survivors? These are some of the broad issues of identity and identification 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 1

MW, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Short Fiction

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, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

It’s Alive! Frankenstein and Adaptation

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. Many of these adaptations have brought the key social and political issues of their own time to bear on Shelley’s tale of scientific overreach and moral conflict. And recent adaptations engage powerfully with our own obsessions: colonialism and racism, , justice and crime, gender and sexuality, corporate greed and government power, media technology and artificial intelligence. Reading adaptations enable us to put such thorny issues in their historical and cultural contexts, to see how they have evolved over time, and to consider how they—and we—might develop in the future. Adaptation shows us that literature, like Frankenstein’s creature is alive! After closely reading Shelley’s original novel and investigating several of its themes and contexts, we will explore a selection of adaptations of Frankenstein in a variety of media and genres. Assignments will include both in-class and take-home writing and a final exam.

Term 1

MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

The Self in (and Out of) Place

This section of ENGL 110 will focus on the relationship between self and place. How does place (geographical, social, psychological, textual) shape our understanding and definition of self, how we imagine ourselves as human beings in the world? And how does literature both define and mediate the relationship between self and place? In our readings, we will address questions of class, gender, sexuality, nationality, and race, as they intersect with our main categories. We’ll explore these questions in poetry (by Thomas Wyatt, Christina Rossetti, William Blake, Linton Kwesi Johnson, David Dabydeen, Jackie Kay, Tom Leonard, Dionne Brand, and others), drama (Ayub Khan-Din’s East Is East and Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters), short stories (by Angela Carter, Angélique Lalonde, William Faulkner, and Haruki Murakami), and a film, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning.

Term 1

MW, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Identity and Identification in Literary Texts

How do we define ourselves – as Canadians, as artists, as lovers, as survivors? These are some of the broad issues of identity and identification 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, 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

The Body at the Border

This course introduces students to methods for studying cultural expressions and critical theory by focusing on the body’s relationship to borders. In particular, we will examine how borders in their various forms are represented, interrogated, or reimagined in contemporary North American and diasporic cultural productions. We will focus on the relationships between race, gender, sexuality and narratives of migration that illuminate ongoing histories of imperialism and settler colonialism. The course uses the frameworks of literary analysis, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and migration and diaspora studies in order to attend to formal and thematic components of cultural productions, and to put them in conversation with questions about power, embodiment, and difference. In doing so, students will develop skills essential to university-level reading, writing, and critical analysis.

Term 2

MW, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

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).

But 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 friends 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 following: I, Robot; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep; The Murderbot Diaries, vol 1 (the two novellas All Systems Red and Artificial Condition); Klara and the Sun.

Term 2

MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 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 the 21^st 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, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Literature for a Warming World

“People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”  (Greta Thunberg, address to the United Nations General Assembly, 2019)

When we think about climate change, we may feel torn between concern for the fate of our planet and our desire for an unending supply of consumer goods. Depending on our politics, respect for scientific expertise, and ecological sensibility, we are likely to admire figures like Greta Thunberg or throw our lot in with her critics and plead the necessity of continued economic growth. Wherever our allegiances lie, we may wonder what potential worlds await us. In this course we will read a variety of literary representations of worlds altered by climate change. Readings will include a selection of poems and short stories, Catherynne M. Valente’s 2021 novel The Past is Red, and Bong Joon-ho’s 2013 film Snowpiercer.

Term 1

MW, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

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 political controversies, such as the Trump regime, the public function of science, and whatever current controversies fill the headlines this semester.

Term 1
TR, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

The description for this course is not yet available.

Term 2

MW, 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM

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 problem solving and creativity.

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 respond to the materials studied in written assignments, engaging more closely with texts and examples.

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

MIGRATIONS

This iteration of ENGL 200 takes a collaborative approach to key scholarly, theoretical, and critical approaches informing the study of literatures in English at UBC. In working with the teaching team to consider readings in a variety of forms and genres, from a range of periods and contexts, you will build your academic skills in reading, analysis, and critical writing..
Sections 001, 002, and 003 will be led, respectively, by Professors Miranda Burgess, Kevin McNeilly, and Janice Ho. Our shared approach to the course will centre on Migrations. Together we will examine texts and narratives about travel, mobility, migrations, journeys, departures and arrivals of various kinds--voluntary, forced, opportunistic, and fantastic. We will ask how literature can help us think about such questions as these: What types of social and political factors lead or force people to leave their place of origin? What does it mean to have a place of origin, and who has been entitled to claim one? How are borders established and what do they do? How does dislocation create new forms of being and belonging? Texts we will study include M. NourbeSe Phllips’s Zong!, post-Windrush Black British writing, Ling Ma’s Severance, Brian Friel’s Translations, and Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, and a selection of nineteenth-century poetry.

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

Reading In and Out of Place

Our theme for this section of English 200, a team-taught course introducing students to the scholarly study of literature, considers how we read in, out of, and for “place” in literary texts. We are going to think through how literary texts depict and imagine different kinds of spaces and places, and explore how individuals and communities inhabit them and move between them. From thousand-year-old poems musing on exile and landscape, to early modern pastoral imaginaries, to contemporary speculative fiction and computer games, this course will examine how literature and place interact in creative and critical ways. We will also reflect on our own work as readers in this place – in and on a University built on unceded Musqueam territory inhabited by people from around the world.

Together, we will engage with not only literary texts (novels, poetry, and short stories) but also consider other multimedia forms such as film, music, graphic novels, and computer games. Possible course texts include Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, NORCO (by Geography of Robots and Raw Fury, 2022), Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, as well as a range of Old English poems (in translation), early modern poetry, and short stories.

ENGL 200 is a collaboratively-taught exploration of key scholarly, theoretical, and critical approaches informing the study of literatures in English at UBC. Through a diverse set of readings that cross genres, historical periods, and social contexts, this course aims to develop skills in reading, analysis, and critical writing. Students will work closely with one faculty instructor in a small-class setting. Three of these small classes will join together in a cluster for one lecture on each week’s designated texts and topic, with instructors rotating through these classes so that students will get a sense of the interests of three different English faculty members.

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

Transitions

This course is a collaboratively-taught exploration and application of key scholarly, theoretical and critical approaches informing the study of literatures in English. The broad theme of transitions will be explored through a range of diverse texts including Kate Chopin's The Awakening, David Chariandy's Brother, selected poems and a variety of short stories.

Students will attend one large group lecture a week and participate in two smaller discussion classes.

Students will write short essays in class, engage in discussion and intellectual exchange, and write one longer take-home essay. There will also be a final exam. 100% attendance is expected, attendance will be taken, and the final mark will be adjusted accordingly.

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

British Literature, Cultural Tradition, and Social Change

English 221 surveys British poetry, drama, fiction, and non-fictional prose from the 18th century to the present. This section spans the upheaval of the Revolution in France (1789) to ongoing conflicts in former British colonies in Africa. We will read a rich array of texts from The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Edition, Volume B (3E) by writers ranging from Edmund Burke to Warsan Shire. By situating British literature in its historical contexts, we will analyze dynamic interrelationships between cultural tradition and social change, extending to the reinterpretations afforded by selected adaptations, documentaries, and performances. Throughout, students will cultivate skills in literary criticism through close engagement with texts as they also compare and contrast forms, issues, and styles within and across historical periods. The course requirements may include a midterm, an in-class essay assignment, and a final examination.

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

What if…? Speculative Storytelling 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 1
TR, 12:30PM- 2:00PM

American Gothic: From Edgar Allan Poe to Jordan Peele

Students will study the tradition of American gothic literature, reading nineteenth-century stories, novels, and poems produced in the US, as well as watching films based on nineteenth-century texts and histories. Authors to be studied include Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry James. Films include Robert Eggers’ The VVitch and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.

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

This course will be a survey of poetry in English from the 16th century to the 21st century. We’ll read a selection of (chiefly) lyric poems; the readings will be available online through the library. The students will learn the main forms of English poetry. We’ll concentrate of figuring out how poems work.

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

Jane Eyre and Alice in Wonderland: Then and Now

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 two novels and two twenty-first-century reimaginings: Patricia Park’s Re Jane
(2015), described by Park as “a Korean American updating of Jane Eyre to contemporary New York and the world of organic produce and identity politics,” and Elizabeth LaPensée and KC Oster’s Rabbit Chase (2022), an Indigiqueer wonderwork in which Anishinaabe culture and story-telling meet Alice in Wonderland. We will also explore the ideological assumptions—with respect to race, gender, sexuality, class, mental and physical ability, the environment, ethics, religion, and education—implicit in the original works and in their reimaginings, and in our readings of them.

Course requirements: Assignments will include two in-class essays and a final exam.

You will be required to have read Jane Eyre in its entirety by Tuesday, January 19th (the third week of term). Please begin reading before term begins.

You are strongly encouraged to read print editions because reading print helps you to read deeply; however, if you need to read digital editions for accessibility reasons, you may read the authorized eBook versions of the print editions listed below.

Our texts: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World’s Classics); Patricia Park, Re Jane (Penguin); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview); Elizabeth LaPensée and KC Oster, Rabbit Chase (Annick Press).

Term 2
MWF, 12:00PM- 1:00PM

Feeling the Spirit: the Literature of Possession

In the 1937 expressionist film The Dybbuk, based on S. An-ski's play of the same name, a young bride performs a dance of death with her wedding guests. None of them know that she is possessed by the unquiet spirit of her dead lover, who cannot let the marriage take place. In Louise Erdrich's novel The Sentence, an angry ghost haunts Erdrich's own bookstore during the pandemic summer of 2020. Both of these spirits are vengeful; they seek justice for crimes that have reverberated far beyond the people involved and continue to harm both living and dead.

To be possessed is to be taken over by a spirit, or what feels like a spirit--a possessed person can be haunted like The Dybbuk's Leah, or simply consumed with a passion that overcomes their will. In this course, we will spend time with ghosts, demons, and haunted people, asking what it means to possess and be possessed and what the dead require of the living.

This second-year course requires writing, reading, group work, attendance, and participation (with accommodations when required). There may also be a field trip or two. Assessment will be primarily in-class, technology use will be limited in some class meetings, and generative AI is not permitted.

Term 1
MWF, 4:00PM- 5:00PM

Using Language

A dynamic exploration of English language that balances examining grammatical structure and function with creative application. Students will collaborate to apply what they learn through imaginative, activity-based work, including a final group project.
Using a descriptive linguistic approach and focusing on syntax, semantics and discourse, the course will consider topics such as register, transitivity patterns, grammatical functions and patterns of modification. Much of the course will be activity-based, with students engaging in collaborative and individual activities to develop language analysis skills and awareness.
Throughout the course, consideration will be given to:
• Developing consciousness of the natural rhythms of language
• Understanding the relevance of grammar for everyday communication
• Applying linguistic knowledge for self-expression

The emphasis will be on developing understanding of how language functions and how it can be used.
The core text will be by Huddleston and Pullum, with additional selected readings.

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

Rhetoric & Power

Rhetoric and Power surveys various ways that language creates hierarchies, distributes authority, maintains rank, and subverts power. Along with learning some fundamental rhetorical concepts, we will examine how language and power interact in a variety of contemporary and historical contexts, such as politics, law, and mass media. We will analyze a range of domains, that might include Renaissance Italian royal courts, rebellious social movements, legal cross-examinations, the political functions of definitions, and late shogunate Samurai culture.

Term 2
MWF, 2:00PM- 3:00PM

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 2
MWF, 3:00PM- 4:00PM

How long have Indigenous peoples been making literature? Is literature only found in books? If we expand our definition of literature, how can we also expand our definition of reading, through Indigenous contexts? This course will introduce students to various forms of literatures and methodologies created by Indigenous authors, mainly from North America and the Pacific regions. We will engage with a variety of texts, including poetry, short fiction, blog posts, essays, and journal articles, in a variety of genres including but not limited to non-fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, and dark fiction. Additionally, we will engage with non-textual forms of Indigenous literature, including oral storytelling, performance, television, film, and land-based story.

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

Mediation and Power

This course introduces students to theories and histories of mediation that illuminate the relationships between power structures, the production of social difference, and the emergence of “new” technologies and digital platforms. With a particular focus on race, gender, empire and colonialism—paired with a capacious understanding of “technology” (taking up theories of race as mediation or technology) and “media”—this course introduces students to overlapping key concepts in media studies, new media theory, cultural studies, and feminist science and technology studies. Units in the course may include the following topics: histories of racial thinking and imperialism, ambient media and mediated environments, surveillance, labour, and popular internet cultures. In addition to reading scholarly writing, students will also be equipped to critically analyze cultural texts, including film, new media, literature, and digital art.

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

There and Back Again: An Introduction to Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Writing for young people has always been anxious about the unruliness of youth. For that reason, one of the most consistent objectives of children’s and young adult literature is to guide readers from childishness to maturity—to tamp down any tendency towards rebellion, impulsivity, and other socially unacceptable behaviour and to encourage compliance with a wide range of social norms, including piety, obedience to parents and teachers, and conventional expressions of gender. In other words, regardless of what children want, writing for young people almost always pursues some adult’s agenda.

One of the most common ways adult writers try to shape young readers is through the home/away/home again narrative. These stories usually open with the child at home, safe and protected. And yet, something is always little wrong: developmentally, the child is somehow stuck and needs to mature. And so, our young heroes and heroines venture (or are forced) out into a dangerous world where they encounter challenges and learn lessons before returning home, a little more mature than when they left.

In this course, we’ll examine fiction that deploys the home/away/home again pattern. We’ll begin with a selection of classic fairy tales before turning to 20th- and 21st-century children’s literature, including C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, Louis Sachar’s Holes, Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary, and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s graphic novel This One Summer.

Term 2
MWF, 10:00AM- 11:00AM

From Fairylands to Westeros: An Introduction to Fantasy Literature

This course will introduce students to the history and development of the fantasy genre from the late 19th century through to the early 21st century. We will read a range of well-known and lesser-known works from the fantasy genre, tracking the various movements within the genre and asking the question of what fantasy does for its many readers. The course will begin with the early origins of fantastical writing in the English tradition, before moving on to the mainstream growth and popularity of the genre in the 20th century, and then to the many different reactions to the dominance of the Tolkien-esque model that we have seen in the past few decades. The course will explicitly engage with feminist and indigenous engagements with fantasy in the past twenty years, and ask questions about where fantasy goes from here. We will also take into account the role that tabletop and digital gaming have played in the more immersive and ludic directions that fantasy has taken.

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

Introduction to Critical Plant Studies

Our topic is the study of plants from a critical, Humanities perspective. Our readings may include short to mid-length writings by Kincaid, Kimmerer, VanderMeer, Simard, Orlean; poetry by the Gawain-poet, Shakespeare, Herbert, Marvell, and Pulter; films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Little Shop of Horrors (1986); and critical pieces by Marder, Chen, Bataille, Taussig, Z. Smith, and others.

There will be a midterm, final exam, and a term paper. This is a lecture course; attendance is required, and participation is strongly encouraged. Each student will also submit a “plant report”: this is a semester-long project about a flower or tree of the student’s choosing. For this assignment, each student will research the plant’s presence in pop culture and craft a portfolio (visual, verbal, intermedial) for it.

Term 2
TR, 2:00PM - 3:30PM

Reading Surfaces

In this course, we will survey key texts in emerging canons of graphic media—comics, illustrated texts, cartoons, graphic novels, graffiti, and other visual media—with an eye to establishing our own workable critical reading practices. What do graphic texts tell us about the limits of literature, and about the relationships between art and popular culture? How has the emergence of mass-produced graphic forms and genres had an impact on the ways in which we read, and on how we value and evaluate writing? What has become of our sense of what constitutes a book or even a page? How do graphic media encourage us to reflect on the visual, spatial, and material forms of representation, in language and in other sign-systems and mediums? How are graphic media’s increasing popularity and burgeoning readership tied to certain conceptions of identity, subjectivity, sociality, and literacy? How do comics help us to engage with social and environmental crises in our world? Texts for this course include Making Comics by Lynda Barry, Secret Path by Jeff Lemire and Gord Downie, Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze, Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton, and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. The course also features a series of comics-drawing workshops, when students can learn to make their own comics. Students will also have an opportunity to write about and discuss their favourite graphic media.

Students should be cautioned that many of the works on this course syllabus confront sexual violence, misogyny, racism, settler colonialism, national and class prejudice, suicidal ideation, and other troubling—and very real—issues; you should be prepared to be challenged and creatively disturbed by what you read and witness.

Term 1
TR, 2:00PM - 3:30PM

World Literature and Global Cinema

“For me Africa is like the seas Melville missed so much.” – Claire Denis on Beau Travail

Modernity is defined by movement: the movement of people, the movement of capital, and the movement of narrative. What possibilities emerge when we bring these movements into conversation? Does the movement of text to image, or the moving image to text, allow us to rethink our relationship to migration, to contemporary history, and to cultural influence? Drawing on a range of texts and films, we’ll look to bring together a range of otherwise distant people, spaces, and times into conversation. How does Herman Melville’s Billy Budd allow Claire Denis to interrogate the remnants of France’s colonial empire in East Africa in Beau Travail? Why might Nicole Krauss’s narrator in “Seeing Ershadi” be convinced that she has glimpsed the lead of Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry?

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

On Television

In this course we will consider television (especially North American television) as an object of study and a subject for criticism. We will approach television by watching it as well as by reading literary, historical, theoretical, and critical writing about it. Both popular and scholarly treatments of television have been characterized by an array of feelings and fantasies, including sexual fantasy, political anxiety, intense excitement and contempt, and highly reflexive irony. We will try to understand why television is so provocative, why it has been so difficult to understand, and how we may develop tools and techniques to approach it critically. Warning: some of the materials for reading and viewing in this course feature strong language, sexuality, and violence. Viewer discretion is advised.

The learning objectives of this course include:
• to familiarize students with the history of television in the United States
• to introduce students to formal vocabulary to describe televisual experience
• to communicate to students tools for critical thinking and writing about television

The course format will combine lectures, discussion, and group work.

There will be a course textbook as well as other required readings. In addition, weekly television episodes are required viewing for this course. Students will be responsible for these viewings in the same way that they are responsible for the readings.

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

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
TR, 2:00PM - 3:30PM

This introduction to critical theory is themed around groups, democracy, and politics, but also functions as a brief history of the field of theory in the context of literary studies. Our problem- and play-based approach studies what counts as knowledge, how we find meaning and where, how humans adapt, respond, and resist in the face of changing conditions in the world, the status of art as expression, and how we determine communication and interpretation. You might think of theory as consisting in the arguments which justify the work of the arts and humanities. It asks what functions critics and creatively-thinking theorists play in the processes by which societies and cultures reproduce themselves, and it thinks about how to ameliorate damaging conditions most effectively for those in the world who face social, economic, environmental, and political barriers to thriving and flourishing. We will read and discuss a rich selection of short fiction and poems as our exemplary archive in juxtaposition with narrative theory, ecocriticism, theories in media and communication, critical race theory, feminist theory and literary criticism, gender studies, queer theory, old and new materialisms, studies in the workings of the mind and psychoanalysis, decoloniality, post/structuralism, and cultural theory.

Term 2
MWF, 2:00PM - 3:00PM

Rhetorics of Science, Technology, & Medicine

To study the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine is to study both the rhetorical effects of these domains on the world and the rhetorical processes by which these domains are rendered distinguishable, authoritative, and even essential to our survival. In this class, we will situate our study in the context of gender and specifically transgender experience. Regardless of our own gender identities and expressions, we all exist in relation to discourses, industries, and policies that are deeply gendered. From surgical medicine to airport security to the video game industry, our lives are tightly regulated by unspoken assumptions about gender: who can choose it, who can change it, and why it matters. These issues are particularly important to trans and gender nonconforming people who often face obstacles accessing the care and services they need to survive. Even as many scientists, tech developers, and medical practitioners work to be more gender-inclusive, it is becoming apparent that their inclusivity is often limited to people who are white, financially secure, and nondisabled. As we will discover this term, studying the (trans)gendered rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine is not only to make a value judgement on a person's or institution's progressivism but also to evaluate these rhetorics' material effects on trans people’s lives, especially on those who exist at the margins of trans community.

The semester will be divided into two sections. The first half will be methodological and historical, introducing a range of rhetorical approaches to science, technology, and medicine, as well as exposing the (trans)gendered history of each of these domains’ development. We will focus especially on the insights and perspectives of trans, gender nonconforming, and otherwise gender minoritized people. While not all of these scholars are rhetoricians by training, each of them offers important insights on how techno-science and medicine have been rhetorically designed to regulate gender norms. The second half of the course will center trans and gender nonconforming people’s counter-rhetorics that trouble the authority of the medical industrial complex and the profit-driven motivations of the tech industry. These counter-rhetorics reimagine trans life in ways that are both gender-affirming and community-oriented. Throughout the second half of the course, students will collaborate on a service-learning project that addresses some of the health needs of the trans community at UBC.

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

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, China’s Warring States period, middle period Buddhist philosophy, and elsewhere, as well as how these theories still function (or not) today.

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

History and Theory of Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric

Fasten your seat belts for our linguistic-cultural ride down memory line, from way back from the Beowulf poet’s time to just about Geoffrey Chaucer, the “father” of English literature (you will find out why, for instance, that moniker really makes sense from today’s perspective). In this course we will be tracing the development of the English language from its Indo-European beginnings to the end of the Middle English period, sneak peeks to the (Early Modern) Great Vowel Shift included (that’s why English sounds so odd and spells so strangely).

We will deal with the internal development of the language (its ‘structure’) on all levels but will always link a given structural feature to its social functions: 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.

Readings: from a curated list, examples include

Knooihuizen, Remco. 2023. The Linguistics of the History of English. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Available via UBC Libraries (PDFs of chapters), hardcopies at the UBC Bookstore.

Brinton, Laurel J. & Leslie K. Arnovick. 2017. The English Language : A Linguistic History, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Watts, Richard J. 2011. Language Myths and the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hutton, Christopher M. 1999. Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language. Abingdon: Routledge.

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

History of English (HEL): Later Period

Fasten your seat belts again for the second leg of a sociolinguistic ride down memory lane. In this second HEL course we will start in Early Modern times around 1476, when the printing press came to England. From the Gutenberg Revolution to the Zuckerberg Revolution, we will cover everything your heart desires in terms of English, Englishes and English Language Complex.

We will look into how Shakespeare really pronounced his plays’ lines (very different from what you’re used to), reflect on the 18th century (which was so important for how we do things today), and retrace the steps of the British and American Empires and what they brought (and did not bring) on the world. In a way, this course is your ideal (conceptual, not curricular) prerequisite to ENGL 323, Varieties of English, if you plan on taking that course next year.

We will see how language has been used to form (national) identities, how to construct some and deconstruct others, and present it all as “natural”. We aim to analyze when our current phase, its neoliberally inspired ways to communicate, language as commodity, began and what, if anything, can or should be done about it.

Excursions: This course includes two to three excursions during our 2hr time slot. Scheduled are visits to the Spanish Banks, The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and Stanley Park. If possible, I’d also like to take you for a day trip to Fort Langley (currently working this out with admin). The dates for excursions, including the one-day trip to Fort Langley [if possible] will be announced early for you to plan with. If you cannot come to the day-long trip, I will offer you an alternative learning experience. Don’t be deterred if you’re not a fan of excursions, we’ll find a way for you to partake regardless.

Readings: from a curated list, examples include

Dollinger, Stefan. 2026. Disciplinary moulds and epistemological clashes: the historical lexicography of Austrian German and Canadian English as rather different test cases. In Lexical Variation and Knowledge Construction across Historical, Methodological, and Cultural Ecologies, ed. by Rita Calabrese, Rossella Latorraca, Jacqueline Aiello, and Dirk Geeraerts, 220-241. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Beal, Joan, Morana Lukač and Robin Straaijer (eds.) 2024. Routledge Handbook of Prescriptivism, Vol. 1: Theoretical and Methodological Approaches. Abingdon: Routledge.

Knooihuizen, Remco. 2023. The Linguistics of the History of English. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Available via UBC Libraries (PDFs of chapters), hardcopies at the UBC Bookstore.

McCulloch, Gretchen. 2019. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language. New York: Riverhead Books.

Dollinger, Stefan. 2019a. Creating Canadian English: the Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brinton, Laurel J. & Leslie K. Arnovick. 2017. The English Language : A Linguistic History, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Watts, Richard J. 2011. Language Myths and the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tieken, Ingrid Boon van Ostade. 2009. An Introduction to Late Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Mair, Christian. 2006. Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Term 2
MWF, 12:00PM - 1:00PM

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 1
TR, 2:00PM - 3:30PM

Some scholars argue that we should not longer speak of “English”, but of the “English Language Complex”, because the ELC is so highly diverse today and cannot be compared with the language of around 1600. While there are parallels with Latin diversifying and being codified (made) into different languages, the situation with Englishes in the world is not fully identical. In this course, we’ll look at this “new” and very young globally-used language called Anglais, Englisch, الإنجليزية, or 英语.

Where is a particular kind of English used? Is Tok Pisin ( Talk Pidgin, an official language in Papua New Guinea) still English or something else (answer” it’s a language in its own right)? How many Englishes are there? What’s English anyway? What’s language? 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 a paper on a variety of English of your choice (from a curated list).

Textbook

Jenkins, Jennifer & Sonia Morán Panero. 2025. Global Englishes: A Resource Book for Students. 4th edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

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

The Language of the Media

There has been much interest recently in the impact that contemporary media (print news, social media and image-plus-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, 11:00AM- 12:00PM

Cognitive Approaches to the Study of Meaning

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, 3:00PM- 4:00PM

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.

Term 1
Online, asynchronous

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.

Term 2
Online, asynchronous

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

Media Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media History

Recent years have seen a wealth of media studies focused on what we might broadly call the materialist turn in the humanities – that is a move away from the scholarly focus on language and representation and towards a greater interest in the material world: objects, the body, and the environment. This course takes up this new scholarship in order to historicize and theorize the material relations of media production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption.
Drawing on eco-materialist methods, the energy humanities, and decolonial media studies the course will examine both narratives about and the material conditions of media workers, the development and use of communication technologies, media infrastructures and their impacts, as well as media audiences and practices of consumption. Looking at examples from the 19th Century until today, we will pay special attention to media’s relationship to resource extraction, colonialism, and militarism.
The course combines lecture and discussion with screenings, archival research, and hands-on project-based learning. In addition to written work, students will collaborate on a semester-long research project and exhibition. In this course students will:
• Explore new theories of media materiality and materialism
• Analyze media images and texts in historical context
• Historicize the material relations of media production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption
• Learn archival research skills using digital tools
• Develop media literacy beyond the text to help them think critically about their own media use

Term 1
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 2
TR, 9:30AM- 11:00AM

From Codex to Code

“Never judge a book by its cover,” we are often told, and yet we do judge books, not only by their covers, but also by their typefaces, their illustrations, where they are filed in the bookstore or the library, and any number of other factors not apparently directly related to their content. This course will introduce participants to book history, a discipline that unravels the complex relationships between particular books, the texts they contain, the cultures that produced them, and the readers who encounter them.

D.F. McKenzie famously described bibliography as the sociology of texts. As we move through important moments in the history of book production, we will explore how materiality and meaning interact, in a range of historical and cultural contexts. Along the way, we will learn about the many forms texts have taken over the centuries, from oral recitations to ebooks, and everything in between.

A unique feature of this course is that we will meet regularly in Rare Books and Special Collections in the Barber Learning Centre. Here, you will have the opportunity for hands-on experience with a wide collection of rare materials dating from the Middle Ages to the present. You will pursue your own original research with our unique materials, informed by our discussions and readings focused on the role of modes of production, dissemination, and storage of text-objects in determining the reception and social function of texts.

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

Evolution and Culture

Evolutionary theory has transformed the stories we tell about ourselves and the way we tell those stories. This course will examine how literature and science have combined to redefine the human and alter perceptions of the natural world since the mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian revolution. How has evolutionary theory defined our perceptions of other species and the natural world? How have imagined pasts and futures of human evolution participated in constructing race, gender, sexuality, and ability? How has evolutionary thinking redefined what it means to be human? Do literature and culture have a role to play in human biological, psychological, or social adaptation?

Our approaches to such questions will help think about the relationship between literature and science more broadly. We will ask how these two areas of knowledge and communication came to be perceived as opposites, but also examine the many ways in which literature provides a space for science. How can fiction uniquely critique or advocate techno-scientific advancement?

Propose radical hypotheses? Project the ramifications of scientific discovery for self, species, and environment?

We will approach these questions through a variety of texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, from authors and thinkers including Charles Darwin, George Eliot, Thomas Huxley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H.G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut, and Octavia Butler.

Term 2
MWF, 10:00AM- 11:00AM

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 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.

Students should have some experience studying languages and should know the parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, article, etc) before beginning the course. Multilingual students, including those for whom English is a second or third language, are encouraged to take the course.

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

Women Writers of the Middle Ages

This course will focus on writing by Heloise (and her correspondent Abelard), Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, and Margery Kempe. We will consider the historical and literary contexts for each, reading some brief excerpts from others, including other writers who will help us understand the breadth and depth of the medieval tradition of women’s writing. Topics will include these writers’ connections with some of the most significant developments of the High and Later Middle Ages, such as the rise of chivalry and “courtly love”; the growth of writing in the vernacular languages and in literacy; increasing lay piety and the trend toward devotion grounded in the emotions; and challenges to secular and spiritual authority. Inevitably, we will approach these writers, in part, through their relations with men, as literary models, mentors, patrons, counsellors, and adversaries. All readings will be in modern English translation.

Term 1
Online, asynchronous

Love and Honour: Medieval Chivalry and Courtly Love

The courtly poetry of medieval Europe develops out of a vibrant reimagining of elite culture in the twelfth-century that spread like wild-fire across the courts of Europe. The development of the entwined ideologies of chivalry and courtly love (fin amour) create an environment that produces some of the masterpieces of European literature. This course examines these two social phenomena from their origins in the twelfth-century court culture exemplified by the poetry of Chrétien de Troyes, Andreas Capellanus, and others, through to the flourishing of literary activity in the world of fourteenth-century England.
We will read a range of medieval texts, some in modern translation and some in the original Middle English, ranging from Chrétien’s Lancelot, selections from chivalric manuals, secular and religious love lyrics, Sir Perceval of Gales, to the popular romance The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnall. Finally, as the capstone text of the course, we read the alliterative Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a complex meditation on honour, love, the natural world, and the search for human perfection. This classic text, long central to the canon of English literature, will be examined through lenses both traditional and contemporary, asking not only what it meant in its fourteenth-century context, but what it continues to mean to us today in our own time of cultural and environmental crisis.

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

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: A World of Words and a Sea of Stories

With the help of a reader-friendly edition and a series of structured but gentle lessons, you will acquire facility in reading Chaucer’s Middle English. More importantly, you will learn how Chaucer makes use of his language’s power in assembling a series of narratives ostensibly told by the diverse company of pilgrims he met on the way to Canterbury. The pilgrims’ tales create a conversation about many themes, including class, love, sex and gender, work, language, the nature of narrative itself, and the pleasures and travails of studenthood, and our class meetings will reflect the collection’s spirit with regular sessions of open discussion. We will consider the linguistic and literary innovations that led readers to consider Chaucer the “father of English poetry” together with the sense of humour – by turns satirical, bawdy, and self-deprecating – that makes reading his poetry a constant joy.

Term 1
MWF, 4:00PM- 5:00PM

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

Our topic is Shakespeare’s drama. We’ll survey a range of genres – comedy, history, tragedy, and romance – to think about dramatic conventions in the early modern period and to gauge the degree to which Shakespeare adheres to them and breaks form. Possible readings include Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry IV, Part One, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado about Nothing, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale.

This is a lecture course, and participation is strongly encouraged. There will be biweekly reading quizzes, a midterm, a final exam, and a term paper. Each student will also memorize a speech from one of our plays and recite it during office hours.

Term 2
MWF, 2:00PM- 3:00PM

Political Bodies, Social Selves: 17th century Literature

17th century England was a culture good at creating crisis: for itself, in its civil wars, and then for others, in its rapidly expanding colonializing projects. This was also a world fascinated by women’s powers, gender-fluid performance, unruly workers, the idea of trees, the mysteries of the spirit, and the meaning of community. With a king who called himself the nursing mother of the nation, and exploitative cooperatives doing deals in India, with sermons described as “a making love to the congregation” and poems imagining Indigenous peoples as the new Adam, 17th century English literature is packed with startling, complex, and important moments in the making of Englishness, whiteness, gender, and citizenship. Violent, sexy, and witty, painful, nostalgic, and vivid, this literature speaks to our world in its own powerful and troubled voices.
Course-modules will include Class and Social Satire; Religious Believing; Violence and the Stage; Misogyny and Romance; Rhetorics of Early Colonialism; Myths of the Citizen. We’ll read pastoral satires, country-house poems, civil-war debates, blood-tragedies, amorous verse, and religious confessions (Amelia Lanyer; John Donne; Mary Wroth; John Webster; Ben Jonson; Walter Ralegh; Oliver Cromwell; Thomas Hobbes; Katherine Philips).
The course will be as interactive as I can make it: workshops, discussion, collaborative projects, group-work. You’ll have a custom anthology and lots of choice in your writing projects.

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

The first week of this course will be introductory. We’ll look at Milton’s life and career and read one of his shorter poems. For the rest of the course we’ll read Milton’s great epic Paradise Lost at the rate of one book per week. Students are not required to be familiar with epic poetry or with Christianity.

Term 1
MWF, 9:00AM- 10:00AM

Regulating Fantasy: Unruly Imaginations and Supervisory Education in Eighteenth-Century Children’s and Young Adult Literature

“Let me observe to you (which I would have you communicate to your little friends) that giants, magic, fairies, and all sorts of supernatural assistances in a story, are only introduced to amuse and divert: for a giant is called so only to express a man of great power” (Sarah Fielding, The Governess, 1749)

Plots of most eighteenth-century books for children and teens reflect the adult agenda of turning youth into well-behaved respecters of parental, social, and religious authority. The young, however, were not always as compliant as adults wished. Both as characters within texts and as real-world readers, children appropriated their elders’ reading, emphasized apparently minor or incidental elements of narratives, and engaged in subversive modes of interpretation. Nowhere was the tension between the priorities of children and adults more apparent than in the anxious attention to the dangers of fantasy that marked contemporary educational theory as well as the texts and paratexts of writing for youth.

This course will examine eighteenth-century strategies for disarming the threat fantasy posed, from the role translators and editors played in legitimizing French fairy tales, to the London publishing industry’s attempts at rendering folk and fantasy literature educational, to the development of a model of supervisory education, though which wise adults corrected the misunderstandings of their wards and students. After a brief overview of the prevailing models of childhood in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, we’ll turn our attention to fairy tales by Charles Perrault, Jeann-Marie LePrince de Beaumont, and Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy—the fantasy literature most widely available to youth. We’ll then examine writers working in second half of the eighteenth century—Sarah Fielding, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Day, and Mary Ann Kilner, among others—who incorporated fantastic elements at the same time that they attempted to regulate young readers’ interpretations.

Term 2
MWF, 12:00PM- 1:00PM

Reading the 18th Century with Popular Culture Theory

Studies of modern popular culture have illuminated the complex relationships that individuals and groups maintain with the larger artistic, political, economic, and social movements around them. Through detailed engagements with eighteenth-century popular culture, this class will work collaboratively to illuminate the relationships among high culture, women’s culture, and popular culture, and the ways in which the conventional masculinization of high culture constitutes the feminine as the popular. Recognition of the historically naturalized links between the feminine and the popular in fiction (both frivolous products of fashion, determined by performance and consumption) will provide a scaffold for our work in other literary and cultural contexts that have previously been regarded as separated by less nuanced boundaries of high and low culture, including blockbuster plays like The Beggar’s Opera, shocking fiction like Behn’s The Fair Jilt, and the literary/satirical/political hissing match around the pop cult phenomenon Pamela, and one of the most adapted of Regency fictions, Jane Austen’s Emma. While most of this course will focus on popular culture created in the long eighteenth century, we will end with a module on the implications of eighteenth-century women in modern popular culture, including a screen adaptation of Emma.

Assessment: in-class write, essay/s, quizzes, class contributions, final exam

For a head start, read our longest text Emma over the break, and/or Richardson’s Pamela (or just the first 200 pages, which is what everyone was arguing about!)

Term 2
TR, 2:00PM- 3:30PM

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, “lyrical” ballads and tales, sonnets (“little songs”), melodies, and improvisations—we will dive into meter, rhythm, sound, diction, poetic devices, and literary effects to bring the Romanticism’s musical origins, contexts, and significance to the surface. We will explore how 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 think seriously about the ways poetic music opens up questions of feeling, environment, volition, desire, identity, race, sexuality, personal growth, and social order. Primary readings will feature poems and poetry collections by Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Robinson, William Blake, Robert Burns, Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats, 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 1
MWF, 10:00AM - 11:00AM

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, J. D. Salinger, and others. 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. 100% attendance is expected, attendance will be taken, and the final mark will be adjusted accordingly. Please note: this course both acknowledges and ignores the boundary line of "1890." Please also note: this course is resolutely unfriendly to AI tools and CHATGPT etc.

“And what is the reason?”
“Do you not see the reason for yourself?” (Melville, "Bartleby").

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

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”
 Mary Louisa Molesworth and Walter Crane, “The Brown Bull of Norrowa”
 Oscar Wilde, Walter Crane, and Jacomb Hood, “The Happy Prince”
 Oscar Wilde, C. 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”
 E. 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 print copy, eBook); Oscar Wilde, The Complete Short Stories (Oxford World's Classics); and Victorian Fairy Tales, edited by Michael Newton (Oxford World's Classics).

Term 1
TR, 3:30PM - 5:00PM

Popular Victorian Fiction: Page and Stage

“No, I haven’t read it—but I saw the play!” In the nineteenth century, stage adaptations helped to create and to sustain a novel’s popular success, much as screen adaptations do today. In this course we will explore how and why Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd became—and have remained—so popular with readers, script writers, choreographers, and audiences. Questions that we will ask include: 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? Why has Far from the Madding Crowd been popularly defined in seemingly contradictory ways: as sensation fiction, pastoral idyll, traditional ballad, love story, and realistic novel?

As we attempt to answer these and other questions of cultural production, 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 novels and in a selection of stage adaptations from the Victorian period to the present, and in our (and the Victorians’) interpretations of them.

Pre-reading of at least one of our longer novels (Jane Eyre and Far from the Madding Crowd) is highly recommended.

You are strongly encouraged to read print editions of the novels because reading print helps you to read deeply; however, if you need to read digital editions for accessibility reasons, you may read the authorized eBook versions of the print editions listed below.

Reading and viewing list: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford World’s Classics); Jane Eyre or The Secrets of Thornfield Manor, adapted by John Courtney, 1848 (Jane Eyre on Stage, 1848-1898, UBC Library); Jane Eyre, devised by the Company and directed by Sally Cookson, 2015 (National Theatre Collection 1, UBC Library); Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Broadview); Alice in Wonderland: A Musical Dream Play, in Two Acts, for Children and Others, Act I, adapted by Henry Savile Clarke, music by Walter Slaughter, 1886 (script, score, 2020 University of Kent performance); ZooNation, The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, written and directed by Kate Prince, music by Josh Cohen and DJ Walde, 2014 (if I am able to obtain access to a streamed version; description, highlights and “Hatter’s House”); Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (Oxford World's Classics); Far from the Madding Crowd, adapted by Joseph Comyns Carr and Thomas Hardy, 1882 (to be posted on Canvas); a twenty-first century stage adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd TBD.

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

Afterlife: Gothic Horror and the Tradition of Psychoanalytic Reading

This course will study nineteenth-century American gothic literature and the films it inspired in the context of psychoanalytic theory and its offshoots. Fictional texts to be studied include: the stories and novels of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and H.P. Lovecraft. Films to be studied include Roman Polansky’s Rosemary’s Baby, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Ana Lily Amarpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Jordan Peele’s Us and Get Out. We will be reading essays by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Slavoj Žižek, and Hortense Spillers, among others. Students will not only study landmarks in the history of gothic literature and film but also episodes in the history of psychoanalytic theory as it developed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Term 2
Online, asynchronous

This course analyzes twentieth-century literary modernisms through the lens of experimental movements, networks, locales, manifestos, and avant-garde performances. Some descriptions of modernism are bloodless abstractions about formal experimentation, academic disruption, and modernist reaction against a middle-class 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, Yeats, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, O’Casey, Beckett, Larsen, Rhys, others.

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

Modern Novels and Contemporary Crises: Trans/historical Approaches

English 366 engages with canonical and controversial Anglo-American novels on modern social crises. Between World War I (1914-1918) and World War II (1939-1945), many intellectuals confronted a world in the midst of radical change: the unsettling epoch stimulated aesthetic innovations and ideological risks in prose fiction. Attending closely to these contested issues and experimental modes, our multidisciplinary discussions may encompass topics such as war and peace (Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway and Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises); industry and ecology (D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath); and fascism and democracy (Richard Wright, Native Son and George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four). The questions raised by the interwar novel resonate today. Hence, this class highlights trans/historical approaches to modern fictions by addressing the contemporary challenges of re-imagining forms of collectivity in the midst of protracted military conflicts, accelerating environmental degradation, and persistent civil divisions. The course requirements may include a midterm, an essay assignment, and a final examination. Please note that textbooks may be subject to modifications and discretion is advised due to mature subject-matter.

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

Major U.S. Poets, 1950-2025

This course will be an attempt to understand some schools of poetry and their aesthetic values in the United States in the last century and this one, with emphasis on outgrowths of the confessional style. Close-reading of a slow and careful sort will be all the rage in this course. Students will write an in-class essay, post on individual poems, and write a research paper and final exam. The reading list will be eclectic and contain a mix of a few full-length collections and small bundles of poems from others, as well as a few precedents from earlier centuries. Some featured poets will include: Robert Lowell, John Berryman, A.R. Ammons, Larry Levis, Adrienne Rich, Frank Bidart, Robert Hass, Joy Harjo, Louise Glück, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Claudia Rankine.

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

Black Mobilities

Through representative writings about Black subjects’ mobilities, this course explores major conceptualizations of Blackness in the 20th and 21st centuries. Some Black authors and protagonists describe themselves as exiles, expatriates, cosmopolitans, immigrants (legal or illegalized), strangers, as well as members of the African diaspora. By examining these labels and dominant tropes, we will investigate the co-construction of Blackness and dislocation. Primary readings cover different histories of migration in Africa, the United States, the Caribbean, and Canada. While we often think of the political and economic pull of migration, literature also uniquely registers affective dimensions of mobility. And to that end, we will define mobility broadly to account for transnational movements of people, things, and ideas as well as other kinds of movements within specific spaces inhabited by Black peoples. Along with the primary readings, we will also consider secondary materials by W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman, and Paul Gilroy that will provide some conceptual foundations for reading narratives of mobility.

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

Alternative Infrastructures in African Literature and Film

This course looks to global infrastructures, both literal and literary, as a means of conceptualizing the contemporary questions around race, capital and migration. Infrastructure - the physical and metaphorical systems that facilitate and shape flows of goods, people, information and violence - has become an increasingly generative means of engaging with the inheritances of colonial and postcolonial systems of power. This course will look to contemporary novels, poetry, short stories and films to of reckon with the material and ideological systems that determine the cultural and political possibilities of the present. It asks, too, how infrastructure can be modified, reclaimed, and sabotaged as mode of resistance. Readings draw on materials from South Africa, Egypt, India, Angola, the United States, China, and Benin.

Term 1
MWF, 9:00AM - 10:00AM

Border Crossings and Chaotic Disruptions in Asian Canadian Literature

Should she agree to be a corpse bride to erase her debt and save her family? This is the conundrum of Locinda Lo in Lindsay Wong’s novel Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies. This course on contemporary Asian Canadian literature will examine texts that interrogate borders—between life and death, generations, past and present, human and supernatural, marketplaces, nation-states, and literary genres—in order to consider the complexities, conflicts, and possibilities of “Asian Canadian” as an elastic umbrella term. In addition to Wong’s novel, we will consider the (legal) machinations of migrancy in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People, wartime trauma and diasporic industry in Kim Thúy's Em, as well as colonization and the material traces of the past in Tsering Yangzom Lama’s We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies. We will conclude with Larissa Lai’s Iron Goddess of Mercy, a long poem that speaks to the rage of past, present, and future times.

Term 2
MWF, 2:00PM - 3:00PM

“In the end we all become stories”:
Margaret Atwood and the Stories She Tells

In this course we will discuss works by the iconic Margaret Atwood spanning her 65-year publishing career, exploring the diversity of genres she has worked in as well as considering the cultural impact of her work. We'll begin with her first collection of poetry, Circle Game, and her first novel, The Edible Woman (which was drafted on UBC exam booklets when she taught here as a Sessional Lecturer). Following that, we'll romp through later works including The Blind Assassin, The Robber Bride, Oryx and Crake and (of course) The Handmaid's Tale. We'll also discuss a handful of Atwood's short stories. Along the way we'll engage with responses to her work and the implications of her superstar status in Canadian literature.

Assignments will include a review (either oral or written) of one of Atwood's works not on the course list, a pastiche, a textual analysis and a formal term paper.

As preparation for this course, students are encouraged to read Atwood's 2025 memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.

Term 1
Online, asynchronous

Contested Territories

In this course, we will be reading, thinking, writing, and speaking about Canada and Canadian literature. These are contested terms, concepts, and “territories.” What is Canada? How did it get this way? What is Canadian literature, or "Canlit"? What’s its history and present context? Why do some writers want to “break up” with Canlit, or call it a “dumpster fire”? To consider these and other questions shaping the contested terrain of Canadian literature, we'll be reading and listening to poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and interviews; watching film and video clips; writing discussion board posts and essays; and developing creative projects of our own.

Our course material addresses literature that broaches colonial violence and racism in Canadian history and in the Canadian present; we will spend some time learning about settler colonialism, and reading the work of a variety of Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers in Canada that variously grapples with and contests these conditions. Our course will thus also highlight material that celebrates and imagines traditions, experiences, relationships, and futures that have little to do with “Canada” as such.

We will read fiction and stories by writers including Wayde Compton, Pauline Johnson (Mohawk), Eden Robinson (Haisla/Heiltsuk), Lee Maracle (Sto:lo), Vivek Shraya, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Nishnaabeg); poetry by Jordan Abel (Nisga’a), Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek, Afuwa Cooper, Liz Howard (Anishnaabe), and Kaie Kellough; and essays by David Chariandy, Di Brandt, Alicia Elliott (Mohawk) and Joshua Whitehead (Oji-nêhiyaw). We will also engage with scholarship and practice in Indigenous studies and critical race / anti-racist studies as they pertain to these Canadian literary contexts.

Online/Asynchronous format: This is an online-by-design course with no in-person or “live” (synchronous) meeting times. Learning modules and lecture materials will be released weekly so that we can move through the course together, week-by-week, completing our work at roughly the same time. You will have the freedom to complete the materials (e.g., readings, lectures, activities) at your own pace within each week of the course, though you will be expected to follow specific timelines for readings and there will be be shared deadlines for assignments.

Term 1
MWF, 3:00PM - 4:00PM

NDN Time: Past and Presents Erased, Futures Foreclosed

This course extends and expands on the ideas and existing research on speculative Indigenous futurist texts and their relationship to popular engagements with contemporary social and ecological challenges. The course will examine how different populations stake particular claims to the future, and the political, existential, epistemological, and ontological ramifications of these claims. This work is interested and attentive to the ways in which Indigenous peoples are often written out of the futures that are imagined in mainstream speculative and science fiction texts, while also remaining as a spectral, disavowed presence in contemporary life. In response, this course foregrounds Indigenous futurisms, the otherwise worlds they propose, and the radical futurities they cultivate, while grappling with the present colonial conditions that we must contend with in order to make these futurities vibrant realities. This course intends to foster deepened engagement with the topic of Indigenous futurities, and its relationship to contemporary social and ecological challenges in settler colonial societies. It will result in varying engagements with Indigenous notions of time, kinship, change, and continuity. These notions offer different modes of imagining possible shared futures than are often presented in mainstream texts. The course will feature engagements with scholars, artists, and writers working within the fields of speculative futures, as well as scholars working on ideas of settler replacement, elimination, and self-Indigenization This course, however, differs from these accounts by situating and framing these issues through a futurist lens, and unpacking how depictions of what José Estaban Muñoz (2009) describes as a “forward- dawning futurity” comes to bear on the present and the political, social, and artistic projects in which many settlers are invested. Finally, this course will foreground the voices of Indigenous peoples, especially as it pertains to articulations of the future for Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities. In doing so, we will aim to decentre settler colonial narratives, and centre the radical alternatives Indigenous futurities have to offer.

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

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

Term 1
MWF, 3:00PM - 4:00PM

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?

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

Storying Indigenous Vancouver

ENGL 376 begins from the recognition that UBC Vancouver is located on the unceded homelands of the Musqueam people. To learn literature here requires attentiveness to Musqueam teachings, stories, and relations, and to the responsibilities that come with studying on Indigenous lands. Our work will foreground the vitality of Indigenous knowledge and cultural expression while considering how literary and other forms of storytelling articulate identity, politics, and resurgence in the face of colonial impositions. Readings will include works by Musqueam and other Indigenous authors, in dialogue with critical scholarship on Indigenous identity, representation, and decolonization. We will explore genres such as the novel, poetry, drama, film, and other forms of resurgent creative practice, paying close attention to how these texts speak to ongoing struggles over land, history, and self-determination. Together, we will ask how literature functions as a site of critique, of continuity, and of renewal, and how reading itself can be reshaped by Indigenous approaches to knowledge. The course will also emphasize our own responsibilities as learners: to sustain relations with the land, with Musqueam and other Indigenous communities, and with the intellectual and creative traditions that sustain them. Through lectures, discussions, and potential guest speakers, we will approach the study of literature as an opportunity to uphold obligations and practice accountability in this place.

Term 2
MWF, 4:00PM - 5:00PM

Term 1
Online, asynchronous

“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 1
MWF, 11:00AM - 12:00PM

U.S. Novels Since 1960

This course surveys some of the great innovators in the U.S. novel over the past 60+ years, ranging across the stalwarts of realism, postmodernism, and the proliferation of important multicultural voices in the American canon. Students will read closely and contribute to discussions, write in-class and take-home essays, and also take a final exam. Texts likely to be included (subject to change): Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays; Toni Morrison, Sula; Don DeLillo, Novel TBD; Jennifer Egan, A Visit From the Goon Squad; Chang-rae Lee, A Tender Age (to be published this August).

Term 1
TR, 3:30PM - 5:00PM

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

Term 2
TR, 2:00PM - 3:30PM

Queer and Trans of Color Critique

This course is an introduction to queer and trans of color critique. Queer and trans of color critique names an urgent and insistent intellectual project that considers how histories of racial formation and (settler) colonialism have shaped the categories of “gender” and “sexuality.” This course will attend to two aspects of queer and trans of color critique. The first: its development and foundations in North America, beginning with woman of color feminism of the 1970s and 80s; to its disidentification with queer theory of the 80s and 90s; to its contemporary formations that consider its correspondences between diaspora, capitalism, disability, prison abolition, ecology, migration, nationalism, erotics, aesthetics, and more. The second: queer and trans of color world-making practices. Because this course takes a heterogenous and expansive definition of theory, we will engage with myriad forms of theoretical texts including queer and trans of color music, video games, poetry, (live) performance art, visual art, film, and so forth. By the end of the term, students will have developed their skills as readers of scholarly theory and in literary critique; they will have also their own developed articulation of the central genealogies and key concepts of queer and trans of color critique.

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

Our Posthuman Adolescence: Young Adult Fiction in the Age of AI

“We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism.”

Ihab Hassan, "Prometheus as Performer”

What happens when young adult literature, which has traditionally guided adolescent readers through the task of identity formation, confronts technologies that trouble long-standing assumptions about what it means to be a self—or even a human? We will explore this question by examining post-2000 young adult novels in which non-human entities lay claim to selfhood and humans are surgically, mechanically, and computationally altered in ways that call into question the very idea of human nature. Along the way, we will take some opportunities to consider own relationship to—and status as—posthuman beings, particularly our increased integration with, and reliance on, artificial intelligence. Our readings will include Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox, Bernard Beckett’s Genesis, M.T. Anderson’s Feed, and Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele’s graphic novel The Surrogates.

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

Close Listening: The Lyric Poem

“All art,” Walter Pater once famously contended, “constantly aspires to the condition of music.” In this course, we will read and think together about lyric poetry, exploring intersections of text and musicality, investigating how modern and contemporary lyric aspires to the condition of song. We will consider how lyric pushes at the boundaries and limits of language, and how it helps us to engage with the embodied positionality of the human voice, as well as to think about how we listen to others, to ourselves, and to the more-than-human world. We will spend time closely and carefully encountering the work of five recent, international poets: Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Don McKay, and Claire Malroux (translated by Marilyn Hacker). We’ll consider the rhythmic materiality of both print and performance. Students will also have plenty of room to introduce poems and songs that interest them. What does it mean, we’ll ask, to aspire to sing in our own challenging present tense?

Students should be cautioned that many of the works on this course syllabus confront sexual violence, misogyny, racism, settler colonialism, national and class prejudice, suicidal ideation, and other troubling—and very real—issues; you should be prepared to be challenged and creatively disturbed by what you read and witness.

Term 2
TR, 5:00PM - 6:30PM

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

Language and images in online discourse

In this course we will look at patterns of communication commonly found in online discourse. Such patterns have been emerging alongside the rise of a range of platforms and have now acquired the level of usage stability which makes it possible to uncover their nature. In the in-class discussions and in readings we will be looking at social media sites, news outlets, and sites promoting awareness of current issues (such as climate change, politics, social problems). To better understand the discourse we will consider the form and meaning of linguistic and multimodal artifacts such as twitter posts, memes, campaign posters, ads, emojis, online comments, internet art, etc. Using language and communication theories emerging from cognitive linguistic approaches to figuration and to constructions, we will work together towards a clear understanding of the communicative context we are all immersed in.
Students will be required to participate in discussions of readings and examples, and also to present their proposed analyses of selected artifacts in class. The final project will require deciding on an area of usage to be studied, selecting appropriate examples for discussion, and providing an analysis in terms of concepts learned. The project will require an in-class presentation and a term paper. All readings will be available via electronic library resources.

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

Language and images in online discourse

In this course we will look at patterns of communication commonly found in online discourse. Such patterns have been emerging alongside the rise of a range of platforms and have now acquired the level of usage stability which makes it possible to uncover their nature. In the in-class discussions and in readings we will be looking at social media sites, news outlets, and sites promoting awareness of current issues (such as climate change, politics, social problems). To better understand the discourse we will consider the form and meaning of linguistic and multimodal artifacts such as twitter posts, memes, campaign posters, ads, emojis, online comments, internet art, etc. Using language and communication theories emerging from cognitive linguistic approaches to figuration and to constructions, we will work together towards a clear understanding of the communicative context we are all immersed in.
Students will be required to participate in discussions of readings and examples, and also to present their proposed analyses of selected artifacts in class. The final project will require deciding on an area of usage to be studied, selecting appropriate examples for discussion, and providing an analysis in terms of concepts learned. The project will require an in-class presentation and a term paper. All readings will be available via electronic library resources.

Term 2
R, 9:00AM - 11:00AM

Rhetorical Theory in Times of Armed Conflict

This seminar examines the intertwinings of war (and its weapons and communication technologies) with the rhetorical theories that helped to excuse, justify, resist, and/or suppress organized violence. Likely, we will begin the course with one of the “seven Chinese military classics” (e.g. Sun Tzu). But most course readings will especially, but not exclusively, focus on 20th and 21st century conceptions of propaganda and mass media. Readings will include early US propaganda theorists Bernays and Lasswell, Chinese revolutionaries Lu Hsun and Mao Tse Tung, as well as other propaganda advocates like Kwame Nkrumah and Kim Jong Il. Other readings will examine of key technologies, like radio, television, and the internet. At the end of the semester, we will consider contemporary manifestations of “weaponized” language in digital culture.

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

Contemporary Chaucers

In the first few weeks we will read a number of the most important and influential Canterbury Tales in a modern English translation. One focus of our discussion will be the range of sources and traditions, from Europe and beyond, that informed Chaucer’s writing of the Tales. We will then consider some of the best-known modern and contemporary adaptations, focusing on particular pilgrims and tales (the Miller, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner) and areas (including the African diaspora in Britain, America, and the Caribbean). Works we read together may include, for example, Jean “Binta” Breeze, “The Wife of Bath Speaks in Brixton Market”; Patience Agbabi, Telling Tales; Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden; Marilyn Nelson, The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems; Kim Zarins, Sometimes We Tell the Truth; one or more collections of Refugee Tales by various writers. Class members will develop projects exploring the many ways that Chaucer is represented in the 20th-21st centuries: adaptation in fiction, including for children and young adults, and in poetry; stage, film, animation; translation; illustration; various kinds of allusion such as dramatic monologues based in Chaucer’s work and life. Each class member will give a presentation; there will be opportunities to present on Chaucer and his contexts, and on contemporary responses to his work.

Term 1
W, 10:00AM - 12:00PM

Marvels of Medieval Romance

Term 1
M, 1:00PM - 3:00PM

Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream: Readings in American Literature

In this seminar we will explore how America—as a nation, an idea, a history, a violent reality--is imagined, (mis)remembered, suffered, dreamed, hallucinated, or transformed in some influential and culturally important literary representations. Contexts to be engaged will include the First World War, modernism and modernity, Hollywood in the 1930s, the Depression, the rise of global fascism, the Second World War (mass murder and atom bombs), Cold War terrors, McCarthyism, the Korean War, racial violence and struggle in the 1950s and 60s, feminism, the asylum, the militarized state, mass media and the image world, drugs, assassination (JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, RFK), and the American war in Vietnam. I take my main title from Joan Didion whose “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” kicks off Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). Seminar readings may include--or individual research projects engage--Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), William Faulkner’s Pylon (1935), Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939), J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Malcolm X and Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), Don DeLillo’s End Zone (1972), Michael Herr’s Dispatches (1977), Stephen Wright’s Meditations in Green (1983), and others. Students will give seminar presentations, write a short essay (to be distributed and read aloud), perform close readings (aloud), and engage in discussion and exchange. Students will also write a final take-home essay. 100% attendance is expected, attendance will be taken, and the final mark will be adjusted accordingly.

Please also note:  This seminar is resolutely unfriendly to AI tools and CHATGPT etc.

“And what is the reason?”

“Do you not see the reason for yourself?” (Melville, "Bartleby").

Term 2
M, 2:00PM - 4:00PM

Theorizing Adaptation in/of the 18th Century

King Lear as a comedy. Antony and Cleopatra as romantic melodrama. Classical epistle as erotica. Jane Austen and zombies. Eighteenth-century literature adapted classical and conventional literary forms in ways that interrogated contemporary cultural practice. In this seminar we will discuss the theory and practice of literary adaptation in the long eighteenth century. First, we will first use a combination of both modern and historical theorizations of adaptation to examine practices in the long eighteenth century, including poetic forms like the classical imitation and rewrites of well-known plays. Once we have come to terms with the cultural work being performed in narrative re-inventions in Restoration stages and drawing rooms, we will skip ahead to a grouping of adaptive relationships around Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, including its own source texts and modern textual adaptation. Adaptation studies long ago left behind worrying about fidelity to source texts in order to address both the critical implications of the choices made by adapters and the revisionist engagements of culture that are embodied in these acts of artistic dialogue.
Assessment: presentations, in-class write, essay, significant in-class contribution

For a head start, (re)read Shakespeare’s King Lear and/or Antony and Cleopatra and/or Austen’s Pride and Prejudice over the break—you will be glad you did!

Term 2
F, 9:00AM - 11:00AM

What We Owe the Child: Children and their (Ir)responsible Adults in Literature and Film.

The phrase “children and film” likely calls to mind the child- and family-friendly productions of Disney, DreamWorks, and Studio Ghibli—original stories for young viewers or adaptations of modern best-sellers and classic fairy tales. While there are outliers like My Neighbor Totoro, these are usually only incidentally about the state of childhood. In fact, most movies whose subject matter is childhood have been aimed at adult audiences, and they run the gamut from the whimsical to the heart-breaking. In some of these, children are flâneurs, solitary observers who wander cityscapes and observe the adult world from an outsider’s perspective. In others, children struggle to cope with their dysfunctional families. In still others, they are caught up moments of war or revolution, overwhelmed and powerless in the face of an adult agenda they can’t understand.

This seminar will explore films about childhood and some of the literary texts they adapt. We will consider various related questions: How do literature and films aimed at adults attempt to capture the child’s perspective? What does it mean to be a child in a world designed by and for adults? And what do we, as adults, owe the child in their vulnerability?

The readings and viewings for this seminar are still under consideration, but the short list includes the following. A final list will be available towards the end of summer.

• Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948) and Graham Greene’s short story “The Basement Room”
• Albert Lamorisse’s classic short film The Red Balloon (1956) and Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Return of the Flâneur”
• François Truffault’s The Four Hundred Blows (1959) and Truffault’s interviews on the film.
• Ken Loach’s Kess (1969) and Barry Hines’ short novel A Kestrel for a Knave
• Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978)
• Alain Berliner’s Ma Vie en Rose (1997)
• Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and a selection of classic fairy tales
• Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013) and the English translation of the French graphic novel Transperceneige by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette
• Taika Waititi’s JoJo Rabbit (2019) and Christine Leunen’s novel of wartime Vienna, Caging Skies.

Term 2
R, 2:00PM - 4:00PM

Mapping Urban Indigeneity

This course examines urban Indigeneity as a vital framework for Indigenous literary and cultural studies. Moving beyond narrow questions of authenticity, alienation, or identity, we will consider the city as a generative Indigenous geography shaped by histories of colonial policy, migration, gendered displacement, governance, kinship, and community-making. Through literature, criticism, and cultural texts, students will explore how Indigenous writers and artists represent urban spaces as sites of relation, political presence, resurgence, and land-based practice. The course will also consider how Canadian Indian policy, including the reserve system and gendered provisions of the Indian Act, has contributed to Indigenous migration to urban centres while continuing to frame Indigenous peoples as somehow incongruent with the city. In response, we will read urban Indigenous communities as ongoing political, cultural, and relational formations. Key questions may include: How do Indigenous texts map the city? How do urban spaces reshape ideas of nationhood, belonging, kinship, and land? And how might Indigenous literature challenge critical habits that cast the city as a space of "loss" or disruption?

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

Folk Horror

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

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

Literature in the Age of Generative AI

How do we read literature, and write about it, in the age of generative AI? What does it mean to write and read with integrity? What is a poetics of copying? Conceptual poetry (and conceptual art before that) is premised on the idea that creativity comes not from creating new texts but manipulating existing ones. Nearly two decades ago, leading conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith had already declared that “[t]he world is full of texts, more or less interesting, I do not wish to add any more.” Such a response, he explained, makes sense in the age of the internet when our greatest task is to “learn to negotiate the vast quantity of text that already exists.” This idea is even more fitting – and more discomfiting – in the context of rapidly-developing large language models and generative AI.

This course will explore literature of appropriation (e.g. conceptual poetry like Jordan Abel’s Injun) and literature about appropriation (e.g. a novel about literary plagiarism like Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Plot). It will include essays from Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to Jonathan Lethem’s “The Ecstasy of Influence.” We will ask questions about academic integrity, originality, and creativity, as we try to figure out how to think with and about literature in our current technological climate.

Term 2
W, 2:00PM - 4:00PM

Sonnets

Term 2
R, 10:00AM - 12:00PM

Black Sonic

Black sound is a conceptual framing that considers how sound, noise, speech, and music have shaped Black life. Blackness has its own sound and Black diasporic writers, artists, and performers have mobilized the aesthetic devices of noise and sound to do the work of living and resisting. In this course, we turn our attentions towards various genres of Black sound and its manifestations in literature, performance, film, and more. Some texts may include Beyonce’s Lemonade, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, M.A.A.D City, Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, among others. We will complement the aesthetic with scholarly work by Alexander Weheliye, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Fiona Ngo, Fred Moten, Paul Gilroy, Tavia Nyong’o, and others. The course will also entail sound sessions where students will complete hands-on work around questions of Black sound. Potential sound sessions include: DJing workshop, hiphop and house freestyle workshop, live performances, and/or more.

Term 2
T, 3:00PM - 5:00PM

The Marlowe Seminar

In this seminar, we’ll explore the writings and historical significance of Christopher Marlowe. We’ll survey his full literary career: his translations of classical writers, his drama and his possible collaborations with other playwrights, and his original poems and their afterlives. Our weekly topics will include sexuality, style, empire and race, courtly erotics, and the idea of the “death” of the author. No prior knowledge of Marlowe’s works is required, and we will keep discussion of his more famous contemporary – William Shakespeare – to an absolute minimum. What new things can we learn about early modern literary culture by centering the elusive and charismatic Marlowe?

Each student will lead seminar discussion once and submit a short paper based on it. Attendance and participation are required. There will be much reading to do each week (i.e., more than a play), and the success of seminar discussion will depend on all classmates having completed the reading, which should be incentive for everyone to keep up. The final project is expected to be a longer version of the seminar paper.