ENGL 365A/002: Modernist Literature (January 2025)

Posted on June 21, 2024 by Gisèle M. Baxter

ENGL 365A/002: Modernist Literature

Term 2 | TTh 9:30-11:00am

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Haunted Landscapes of Gothic Modernism

“in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought” – Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Modernism was born out of seismic, revolutionary shifts in society and culture. World wars, political revolutions in Europe and beyond, murderous civil and colonial/imperial wars, economic depression, and successive waves of technological modernization offering mixed psychological and social benefits and injuries laid siege to assumptions that the world was in any way well-ordered or reliably understood. Its literature both reflects conscious innovation and experiment and sometimes opposes these passions for change. Its obsessions respond in complex ways to those seismic shifts in its representations of gender and sexuality, social structures, race and culture, in all cases often in terms of transgression.

And yet, in its drive to make things new, Modernist literature is often a haunted place: spectres of ancestry, of war, of places escaped from collide with the present moment, creating a dark, Gothic modernity. This troubled place will be our focus as winter turns to spring.

Core texts tentatively include Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (to be read as a Modernism precursor), Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison; D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; James Joyce, “The Dead”; and Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude” and “At the Bay”; plus perhaps one more work of short fiction.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a midterm essay, a term paper requiring secondary academic research, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.

Please keep checking this post for more information about the course, its texts, and its requirements. Please email me (Gisele.Baxter@ubc.ca) if you have any questions.

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ENGL 243/002: Speculative Fiction (January 2025)

Posted on June 21, 2024 by Gisèle M. Baxter

ENGL 243/002: Speculative Fiction

Term 2 | TTh 2:00-3:30pm

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Synthetic Humans; Posthuman Dystopias

“We make Angels. In the service of Civilization. There were bad angels once … I make good angels now.” – Niander Wallace, Blade Runner 2049

“Whole generations of disposable people.” – Guinan, “The Measure of a Man”, Star Trek: The Next Generation (season 2)

The near-future and alternate-reality landscapes of science fiction are often terrifying places and have been since Gothic and dystopian impulses intersected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley’s landmark tale evokes dread in the implications of Victor’s generation of a humanoid Creature; this dread echoes in more recent products or accidents of science: clones, robots and replicants, artificial intelligences, cyborgs. Such texts raise issues of gendered exploitation, consciousness and rights, research ethics, and fear, in the realization that these creatures are, ultimately, not human but posthuman, yet often more sympathetic than their makers. However, despite their apparent superiority, such humanoids tend to be defined as commodities. In this course, we will consider the posthuman element of dystopian speculations reflecting on the present and recent past, especially concerning threats of mass surveillance, profit-motivated technology, environmental crisis, and redefinitions of human identity.

Core texts tentatively include William Gibson, Neuromancer; Madeline Ashby, vN; Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, The Matrix: Shooting Script; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go or Klara and the Sun; Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve) plus possibly one other film (or shooting script) or one other novel.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a midterm essay, a term paper requiring secondary academic research, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.

Please keep checking this post for more information about the course, its texts, and its requirements. Please email me (Gisele.Baxter@ubc.ca) if you have any questions.

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ENGL 100/020: Reading and Writing About Language and Literatures (January 2025)

Posted on June 21, 2024 by Gisèle M. Baxter

ENGL 100/020: Reading and Writing About Language and Literatures

Term 2 | TTh 12:30-2:00pm

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Haunted Houses

“What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.” – The Devil’s Backbone (dir. Guillermo Del Toro)

Where is the fascination, even when the deepest mysteries of the universe are being scientifically unlocked, in stories of haunted houses? What accounts for the lure, and even the enjoyment, of tales of terror and horror, even in the 21st century? This course examines the Gothic influence in texts where collisions of past and present, and implications of the uncanny, allow fascinating investigations of social codes and their transgression.

Core texts tentatively include a small selection of public-domain short stories (to be announced); Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger; Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching; and The Others (dir. Alejandro Amenábar); possibly another film; as well as Gardner and Diaz, Reading and Writing About Literature (5th edition). Through readings in current criticism and theory, we will develop strategies for textual analysis in literary and cultural studies. We will also consider the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reaching a “fixed” or consensus reading of any text.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a short primary-text analysis, a midterm essay, a term paper requiring secondary academic research, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.

Please keep checking this post for more information about the course, its texts, and its requirements. Please email me (Gisele.Baxter@ubc.ca) if you have any questions.

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ENGL 301/001: Technical Writing (September 2024)

Posted on June 21, 2024 by Gisèle M. Baxter

ENGL 301/001: Technical Writing

Term 1 | MWF 12:00-1:00pm

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English 301: Technical Writing examines the rhetorical genre of professional and technical communication, especially online, through analysis and application of its principles and practices. You will produce a formal report, investigating resources and/or concerns in a real-life community, as a major project involving a series of linked assignments. This project will involve the study (and possibly practical application) of research ethics where human subjects are involved (e.g. in conducting surveys or interviews). Evaluation will be based on a series of four linked assignments culminating in the formal report, as well as participation in discussion and completion of various textbook exercises.

Think of this course as an extended report-writing Boot Camp: intensive, useful preparation for the last phase of your undergraduate degree, as you start applying to professional and graduate programs, and for the years beyond of work and community involvement. Technical Writing is closed to first- and second-year students in Arts and cannot be used for credit towards the English Major or Minor.

The course text will be Lannon et al, Technical Communication, 8th Canadian Edition, Pearson, 2020 (ebook).

Please note that this is a blended course and will require both participation in synchronous lectures and workshops (which will be conducted and recorded on Zoom) as well as asynchronous but scheduled independent work of the sort done in a conventional online course (including weekly Canvas-based exercises based on textbook readings and occasional peer feedback on drafts).

Also note that while 301 is not a course in remedial grammar, this section will provide online Canvas-based writing resources and workshops designed to help identify writing and proofreading problems, and to provide strategies to address them.

Purchase options:

The UBC Bookstore will order access tokens for the textbook. Other options for ordering include the following:

The 8th Canadian edition of Technical Communication is the only acceptable edition.

Please keep checking this post for more information about the course, its texts, and its requirements. Please email me (Gisele.Baxter@ubc.ca) if you have any questions.

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ENGL 246/001: Literature and Film (September 2024)

Posted on June 21, 2024 by Gisèle M. Baxter

ENGL 246/001: Literature and Film

Term 1 | MWF 2:00-3:00pm

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Term 1 MWF 2:00-3:00p

Vampires on Page and Screen: Transfusions and Transmutations

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.” – Bram Stoker, Dracula

This course examines adaptations in something of the way vampire transformations work, by considering how elements of appearance remain but the resulting creature is always radically different. We’ll go in prepared, not with stakes and garlic but with the critical and theoretical tools needed to move beyond popular online discussions and enable consideration of ideological, political, and cultural questions arising in creating through adaptation a new and separate text in a different genre. Our approach will be more that of literary and cultural studies than film studies, as we consider why stories about vampires, the blood-drinking immortals of myth and legend – and more recently of fiction and film – fascinate us and their adapters, and to what extent visualizing them results a transfusion, a transmutation, or both.

Core texts tentatively include Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla plus one adaptation (ideally the 2019 eponymous film, possibly The Vampire Lovers), Bram Stoker’s Dracula plus two adaptations: possibilities include Nosferatu (either Murnau or Herzog), Dracula (1931; Tod Browning), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992; Francis Ford Coppola). We might also have a look at John Polidori’s novella The Vampyre (or at one as yet unadapted vampire story) and at one vampire film that isn’t an adaptation (e.g. What We Do in the Shadows or Only Lovers Left Alive). Film choices will depend on access through Library Online Course Reserves. As well, academic readings in theory and criticism specifically concerned with adaptation, as well as in Gothic studies, will be set and provided through Library Online Course Reserves.

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a midterm essay, a term paper requiring secondary academic research, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.

Please keep checking this post for more information about the course, its texts, and its requirements. Please email me (Gisele.Baxter@ubc.ca) if you have any questions.

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ENGL 200/001-004: Principles of Literary Studies (September 2024)

Posted on June 21, 2024 by Gisèle M. Baxter

ENGL 200/001-004: Principles of Literary Studies

Term 1 | MWF 10:00-11:00am

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This was a late addition to my courses for next year, so this post is incomplete. I will be responsible for Monday and Friday meetings with a small section of roughly 30 students; all four sections will meet in a large classroom for lectures on Wednesdays. I have provided below information from the Department of English Language and Literatures page of Undergraduate Course Descriptions for Winter 2024; I will provide more detail and a fuller text list as soon as possible. I can say that the texts I’ve chosen to contribute to our text list are Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and Jim Jarmusch’s film Only Lovers Left Alive.

Moving Histories, Travelling Texts

How can Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, the story of two Ghanaian sisters in the 18th century, speak to Lee Maracle’s “Goodbye Snauq,” a retelling of the formation of what we now call “Kitsilano?” What might the opening howl of Beowulf have to say to the teenage djinns of Mati Diop’s Atlantics? Where might the speaker of William Wordsworth’s “I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud” encounter the wandering, lonely narrator of Open City?

This team-taught course brings a diverse range of novels, poems and films together to think about historical and contemporary experiences of migration and movement. Together we’ll investigate literature’s ability to trace a counter-history of migration: what solidarities and connections emerge from histories of loss and displacement?

Please keep checking this post for more information about the course, its texts, and its requirements. Please email me (Gisele.Baxter@ubc.ca) if you have any questions.

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ENGL 362/921: Victorian Period Literature (Summer 2024)

Posted on February 14, 2024 by Gisèle M. Baxter

ENGL 362/921: Victorian Period Literature

Term 1 | TTh 2:00-5:00pm

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Ghosts are Real (So are Vampires): Victorian Gothic Terror, Horror, and the Supernatural

“Ghosts are real, this much I know” – Edith Cushing, Crimson Peak

“There are such beings as vampires; some of us have evidence that they exist” – Abraham Van Helsing, Dracula

Whether we take Edith Cushing or Abraham Van Helsing at their word, the 19th-century Gothic revival certainly emphasized possibilities for terror and horror in tales of the supernatural. However, these interventions of spectral and un-dead beings often take place in the recognizable present; they speak to its anxieties. Perhaps they speak to ours as well, given our recent fascination with Neo-Victorian representations of the 19th century, such as Crimson Peak, as well as Penny Dreadful, From Hell, Sarah Waters’s Victorian trilogy, the numerous adaptations of Dracula, plus many others.

We will examine fiction addressing issues of gender and sexuality; class, race, and culture; realism and the supernatural; urban and rural settings, all in a century known for developments in science and technology (especially photography), social upheaval, and a veneer of respectability, yet with monsters lurking in closets and under beds. Our focus will also permit consideration of the boom in publication of popular literature in a variety of formats, as well as the rise of the professional writer during the 19th century.

Core texts include Margaret Oliphant’s The Library Window, Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and selected short fiction possibly including M.R. James, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”; Elizabeth Gaskell, “The Old Nurse’s Story”; Sheridan LeFanu, “An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street”; Mary Braddon’s “Good Lady Ducayne,” R.L. Stevenson, “The Body Snatcher”; E. Nesbit, “John Charrington’s Wedding” and maybe a couple of Victorian werewolf stories (since werewolf stories feature prominently in the research done for both Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s infamous Dracula). Evaluation will be based on a midterm essay, a term paper, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion both in class and on the course’s Canvas site.

Keep checking this post for more information about the course, its texts, and its requirements.

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ENGL 243/001: Speculative Fiction (January 2024)

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Gisèle M. Baxter

ENGL 243/001: Speculative Fiction

Term 2 | TTh 2:00-3:30 p.m.

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Synthetic Humans, Posthuman Dystopias

“We make Angels. In the service of Civilization. There were bad angels once … I make good angels now.” – Niander Wallace, Blade Runner 2049

“Whole generations of disposable people.” – Guinan, “The Measure of a Man”, Star Trek: The Next Generation (season 2)

The near-future and alternate-reality landscapes of science fiction are often terrifying places and have been since Gothic and dystopian impulses intersected in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Shelley’s landmark tale evokes dread in the implications of Victor’s generation of a humanoid Creature; this dread echoes in more recent products or accidents of science: clones, robots and replicants, artificial intelligences, cyborgs. Such texts raise issues of gendered exploitation, consciousness and rights, research ethics, and fear, in the realization that these creatures are, ultimately, not human but posthuman, yet often more sympathetic than their makers. However, despite their apparent superiority, such humanoids tend to be defined as commodities. In this course, we will consider the posthuman element of dystopian speculations reflecting on the present and recent past, especially concerning threats of mass surveillance, profit-motivated technology, environmental crisis, and redefinitions of human identity.

Core texts tentatively include William Gibson, Neuromancer; Madeline Ashby, Vn; Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, The Matrix: Shooting Script; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve) and Ex Machina (dir. Alex Garland).

Evaluation will tentatively be based on a midterm essay, a term paper requiring secondary academic research, a final reflection essay, and participation in discussion.

Keep checking this post for updates concerning the course, its texts, and its requirements.

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ENGL 110/013: Approaches to Literature and Culture (January 2024)

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Gisèle M. Baxter

ENGL 110/013: Approaches to Literature and Culture

Term 2 | TTh 11:00-12:30 p.m.

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Literary Monsters and Monstrous Literature

Rey: “You are a monster.”
Kylo Ren: “Yes, I am.”
– Star Wars: The Last Jedi

“Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world” – Richard III 1.i

What is a monster? We know monsters from myths and legends, folktales, horror fiction and film. We know their variety: the grotesque, the beautiful, the terrifying, the pitiable, the sports of nature and the forces of evil. Dragons, werewolves, vampires, zombies, Frankenstein’s Creature, Dorian Gray, the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Marisa Coulter, many of the characters in The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones: they’re everywhere, from under the bed to the house next door to the battlefield, and right into a great deal of literature. Which leaves us here: in this section of 110 we’ll focus on how literary texts across the genres use representations of monstrosity in ways that inspire both terror and horror, as well as (let’s be honest) fascination and even enjoyment.

We’ll look at William Shakespeare’s Richard III (a play that meditates on villainy and ambition in demonizing its subject for Tudor audiences, yet still fascinates contemporary ones) and at Ian McKellen’s 1995 film adaptation, which shifts the setting to an alternate-reality 1930s England where fascism takes hold. We will also consider various stage and screen adaptations as approaches to the play, including recent ones using race and gender-diverse casting, and casting as Richard actors who are themselves physically disabled or disfigured. Other core texts include two novels: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, as well as selected poetry (with a focus on the sonnet form).

Evaluation will be based on two timed essays, a home paper, and a final exam, plus participation in discussion.

Keep checking this post for updates concerning the course, its texts, and its requirements.

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ENGL 365/002: Modernist Literature (January 2024)

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Gisèle M. Baxter

ENGL 365/002: Modernist Literature

Term 2 | TTh 9:30-11:00 a.m.

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Haunted Landscapes of Gothic Modernism

“in the middle of my party, here’s death, she thought” – Mrs. Dalloway

Modernism was born out of seismic, revolutionary shifts in society and culture. World wars, political revolutions in Europe and beyond, murderous civil and colonial/imperial wars, economic depression, and successive waves of technological modernization offering mixed psychological and social benefits and injuries laid siege to assumptions that the world was in any way well-ordered or reliably understood. Its literature both reflects conscious innovation and experiment and sometimes opposes these passions for change. Its obsessions respond in complex ways to those seismic shifts in its representations of gender and sexuality, social structures, race and culture, in all cases often in terms of transgression.

And yet, in its drive to make things new, Modernist literature is often a haunted place: spectres of ancestry, of war, of places escaped from collide with the present moment, creating a dark, Gothic modernity. This troubled place will be our focus as winter turns to spring.

Core texts include Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (to be read as a Modernism precursor); Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison; D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; James Joyce, “The Dead”; Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude” and “At the Bay”.

The UBC Bookstore has ordered paperback editions of The Turn of the Screw, Women in Love, and Mrs. Dalloway; Strong Poison is available on Project Gutenberg Canada; the Joyce and Mansfield stories will be linked to our Canvas site.

Evaluation will be based on a midterm essay, a term paper requiring secondary academic research, a final reflection essay, and contribution to discussion.

Please keep checking this post for more information about the course, its texts, and its requirements.

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