Course Descriptions and Materials

ENGL 110_JL1: Approaches to Literature and Culture

TTh 1:00-4:00p

Literary Monsters and Monstrous Literature

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

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

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

We’ll start with William Shakespeare’s Richard III (a play that meditates on villainy and ambition in demonizing its subject for Tudor audiences, yet still fascinates contemporary ones) and Ian McKellen’s 1995 film adaptation, which shifts the setting to an alternate-reality 1930s England where fascism takes hold. We will also consider various stage and screen adaptations as approaches to the play, including recent ones using race and gender-diverse casting, and sometimes featuring as Richard actors who are themselves physically disabled or disfigured. Other core texts include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. There might be one or two short additional texts (such as Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess”, as an introduction to the monologue form, to iambic pentameter, and to monstrosity).

Your writing assignments in this course (two essays and a final exam) will develop skills in both critical thinking and university-level literary textual analysis, and both are much more generally useful and applicable than you might think. I hope there will also be a lot of lively discussion, both in class and on our Canvas site.

ENGL 365-A_001: Modernist Literature

TTh 1:00-4:00p

The 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.

Assignments will include a midterm essay and a term paper (both requiring secondary academic research), as well as a final reflection essay to be written during the exam period.

Course texts will include Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison; D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; James Joyce, “The Dead”; Katherine Mansfield, “Prelude” and “At the Bay”. I strongly recommend getting ahead with the reading, especially of longer texts such as Women in Love.

The Turn of the Screw, Mrs. Dalloway, and Women in Love are available as paperbacks through the UBC Bookstore; all the course texts are in the public domain and I will shortly provide links to good online versions (you could check Wikisource or Project Gutenberg – you are not obliged to donate – for reliable links).

ENGL 243/002: Speculative Fiction (Revised)

Monstrous Science

Term 2 TTh 9:30-11:00a

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

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

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

The landscapes of science fiction are often terrifying places and have been since Gothic and dystopian impulses intersected in Mary Shelley’s landmark novel Frankenstein. Shelley’s tale evokes dread in the implications of Victor’s generation of a humanoid Creature; this dread echoes in more recent narratives concerning clones, robots and replicants, artificial intelligences, cyborgs. Such texts raise issues concerning research ethics, gendered exploitation, the rights attached to consciousness, and the fear arising from the realization that these creatures are, ultimately, not human but posthuman, though often more sympathetic than their makers, despite being relegated to the status of commodities. This course is not about scientific research that has vastly benefitted worlds and their inhabitants (even if such claims are made by the scientists whom we will meet in our course texts): it’s about bizarre singular passion projects and their progeny, about science gone wrong, about the byways of pseudoscience, about the implications of profit-motivated technology, environmental crisis, and redefinitions of human identity.

Core texts include Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Alien (dir. Ridley Scott), Jurassic Park (dir. Stephen Spielberg), and Blade Runner 2049 (dir. Denis Villeneuve).

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

Keep checking this blog for updates concerning texts and requirements.

ENGL 378/001: Contemporary Literature

Vampires Among Us

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

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

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

Core texts include Angela Carter, “The Lady of the House of Love”; Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire; Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching; Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating; Only Lovers Left Alive (dir. Jim Jarmusch); and Shadow of the Vampire (dir. E. Elias Merhige). Our examination will be situated in critical and theoretical approaches to the Gothic as a contemporary area of representation.

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

Keep checking this site for updates concerning texts and requirements.

ENGL 100/024: Reading and Writing about Language and Literatures

Haunted Houses

Term 2 TTh 3:30-5:00 p.m.

“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 such tales of terror and horror, even in the 21^st century? This course examines the Gothic influence in texts where collisions of past and present, and implications of the uncanny, allow fascinating investigations of social codes and their transgression.

Core texts tentatively include Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House; Alan Garner, The Owl Service; Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger; Helen Oyeyemi, White is for Witching; and The Others (dir. Alejandro Amenábar); as well as Gardner and Diaz, Reading and Writing About Literature (6th edition). Through readings in current criticism and theory, we will develop strategies for textual analysis in literary and cultural studies. We will also consider the difficulty, if not impossibility, of reaching a “fixed” or consensus reading of any text.

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

Keep checking this site for updates concerning texts and requirements.

ENGL 490/001: Literature Majors Seminar

Mad Science: Gothic Echoes in Passion Projects Gone Wrong

Term 1: T 12:30-2:30 p.m.

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

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

We will examine the theoretical bases of contemporary approaches to the Gothic as well as to Science Fiction and apply them to various examples of fiction and film. Core texts include Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein (1818 edition); Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; H.G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau; Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake; Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Alien (dir. Ridley Scott), and Ex Machina (dir. Alex Garland). 1-2 short alternate texts will be nominated by members of the class, but will only be required reading or viewing for those students presenting and responding on them.

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

Keep checking this site for updates concerning texts and requirements.