ENGL 200/001-004: Principles of Literary Studies
Moving Histories/Travelling Texts
Instructors: Gisèle M. Baxter, Deena Dinat, Suzanne James, Kevin McNeilly
Term 1 | MWF 10:00-11:00am
Updated August 23.
I will be working with the 002 tutorial group.
“The movement of the beach, this rhythmic rhetoric of a shore, do not seem to me gratuitous. They weave a circularity that draws me in. This is where I first saw a ghostly young man go by; his tireless wandering traced a frontier between the land and water as invisible as floodtide at night…” (Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation)
This team-taught course introduces students to a diverse array of texts and critical approaches to literary studies. Wednesdays will see all sections of the course meet to attend a large lecture led by one of the professors on the teaching team. On Mondays and Fridays students will meet in smaller groups where they’ll engage in close-reading exercises, discussions and writing activities.
Through the course of this semester we’ll explore novels, short stories, poetry and films from a wide range of geographical, cultural and historical contexts. Engaging with expansive definitions of movement and travel– the movement of people and ideas between continents, the transit between prose and poetry, text and image, the shifts between categories of the “human” and the “non-human” – we’ll investigate how mobility and travel shape our experiences of the modern world. How does the exploration of the transatlantic slave trade dramatized in Homegoing continue to walk its way through contemporary New York in Open City? How have ideas of the “monstrous” travelled from the Old English epic of Beowulf to the late-Victorian title figure of Dracula? What might we learn if we draw lines of transit between a ghostly Dakar in Atlantics and the decaying Detroit of Only Lovers Left Alive?
Text List:
- Novels:
- Teju Cole, Open City
- Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing
- Bram Stoker, Dracula
- Short Fiction:
- Thomas King, “Borderlands” and “A Short History of Indians in Canada”
- Poetry:
- Beowulf (anonymous)
- William Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
- Jennifer Chang, “Dorothy Wordsworth”
- Film:
- Atlantics (directed by Mati Diop)
- Only Lovers Left Alive (directed by Jim Jarmusch)
Evaluation will be based on assignments including two collaborative annotations of short passages from course texts resulting in individual focused analyses of these annotated passages, a short creative response to a course text of your choice, as well as a final reflection essay drawing connections between a selection of course texts using our thematic focus on movement and travel.
Please keep checking this post for more information about the course, its texts, and its requirements; email me (Gisele.Baxter@ubc.ca) if you have any questions.