Welcome to RMST 495/520

Posted on July 8, 2026 by Jon

Welcome!

This is the website for RMST 495/520, Fall 2026. Please note that we will not be using Canvas. Everything you need to know about this course will be here, on this website.

Note also that it is at present a work in progress… I will be adding information and resources here up until the beginning of the semester, and even beyond. Some aspects may change in the interim, so I cannot guarantee that the syllabus, assessment, and so on are fixed until September.

But I am making the website open even as I work on it, to give enrolled and prospective students the best idea possible of what the course will be like.

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with me at jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca.

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When I Sing, Mountains Dance: Songs of Selves and Others

Posted on July 8, 2026 by Jon

The subject of the assertion contained in the title of Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019) is, in the first instance, a young man by the name of Hilari who composes poems–though he does not write them down. He comes up with poems mainly for people and animals, and one of them (shades of Walt Whitman) is a song for himself, a “Poem for Me, Hilari”: 

I sing to the moon when it blossoms full, 
Round fang in the kindly night, 
[. . .]

I sing like someone plowing a garden,
Like someone carving a table,
Like someone raising a house,
Like someone climbing a hill,
Like someone eating a walnut,
Like someone lighting a fire.
Like God creating animals and plants.
When I sing, mountains dance. (69)

But throughout this book–a book that is itself surely Whitmanesque in that it, too, “contain[s] multitudes”–we see plenty of others also carving tables, raising houses, climbing hills, and the like. Many sing, and many mountains dance.

The mountains here are the Pyrenees and we are in Catalonia (Solà’s novel is translated from the Catalan), a rural retreat for city-dwellers seeking picturesque “authentic[ity]” (62) or a respite from all the “noise” and the “cars and all the buildings and the pointy corners and the straight lines” of Barcelona (129). Here, one might imagine, is natural peace and age-old tradition, where little changes and perhaps nothing happens.

But we are also on the border between Spain and France, a pathway traipsed by refugees and soldiers fleeing the Nationalist advance of Franco’s forces during the Civil War. This is a countryside strewn with the detritus of war, such that many decades later young children can still come across bullet casings and unexploded grenades half-buried in the earth.

Moreover, this is a landscape of unquiet forces that traverse the boundary between natural and human history, between life and death, between reality and myth. There are the four women, for instance, hanged as witches in some previous century and perhaps not without reason, in that they laugh at authority and “piss upon” the crosses that are “sullying the mountainside” (19). These women are among the many ghosts or revenants that never quite go away (or always come back) as they permeate the stories and songs related and recited by this novel’s many characters.

Almost every chapter, in fact, introduces a new narrator, some of whom are human, usually residents of this precarious existence on the hostile mountainside, and others of whom are more than human. Again, however, these boundaries blur. A bear narrates its violent history with humans and its undying desire for revenge–“Wake up, ye men who hunted us. [. . .] We were here first. Long before men and women” (147). But in the very next chapter, a woman plays the part of a bear in some folk ritual of “the Bear Festival in Prats del Molló” (152), albeit adjusted to the times in answer to the question “When are we going to have a woman bear?” (151). And a little later we hear from Jaume, a man who has escaped the region (but will soon, of course, go back) and who goes by the nickname “the Pyrenees bear” (170).

This is a novel that humanizes great natural forces (even the mountains themselves, or the vast geological pressures that give rise to them, are given a voice, speaking almost sub specie aeternitatis: “Because nothing lasts long. And no one remembers the names of your children” [107]). But it also gives vent to the inhuman fears and desires that both shatter and consolidate the bonds between men and women.

If this novel has a center (and arguably it does not; arguably it is as polycentric as it is polyphonic), it is the story, told in fits and starts, of the family living in the farm or smallholding that goes by the name of Matavaques (“cattle slayer,” as we’re helpfully told [131]. The books opens as a young father, Domenèc, is killed by being struck by lightning, with the weird sisters of course in shadowy attendance. We later pick up on the story of his widow, Sió, his daughter, Mia, and his son, Hilari, he of the oral poems and songs.

Hilari, however, is struck down young, like his father before him, but in his case not by random lightning but in a hunting accident, out with friends. His killer (Jaume, known as the “giants’ son”) is the man who goes by the name of Bear who we meet much later, in self-imposed exile from the mountains after he has spent some time in jail for his crime . . . presumably manslaughter, which goes to show that it is not just cattle that are slayed around here.

It is not clear whether Jaume’s story is one of the “bad stories” that, we are told, are the stories men tell, as opposed to the tales told by the witches and other women, “stories we love because they’re never in the voice or through the eyes of those men who write the bad stories” (112). As a whole, Solà’s novel is a remarkable patchwork of ventriloquy that allows a whole range of entities to speak–and often we hear the same events retold from very diverse viewpoints. 

We do not necessarily have to resolve the differences between these different perspectives, or to know how things will ultimately work out, because we know that this is merely a partial snippet from a much longer history of mountains and the people who live on or near them. Indeed the book ends on something of a cliffhanger: one revenant has returned to Mia’s (Hilari’s sister’s) life, and we do not know what will happen to her relationship with another man who has helped briefly to obscure her loss in the meantime. 

There are still stories to be told. “He’ll say some things,” Mia tells us. “The ones he remembers, the ones that light up like firecrackers when it’s time to say them and you’re able to say them. [. . .] Then I’ll say some things. The ones that I can” (197, 198). And at the end of it all, perhaps “when we’re done, we’ll see who we are” (197). This is a song of their selves, a point-counterpoint of stories of creation and recalibration that is as unending as the tectonic forces that make and unmake the very ground beneath their feet.

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Discontent: Calling Out Bullshit

Posted on July 7, 2026 by Jon

Marisa, the narrator and protagonist of Beatriz Serrano’s Discontent (2025) has what anthropologist David Graeber calls a “bullshit job,” which he defines as “a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence” (Bullshit Jobs: A Theory 3). In her case, her pointless employment is as a mid-level manager in an advertising agency. In meetings, she comes up with clichés or finds ways to fend off deadlines and decisions–“Let me check a few things” (7)–while she daydreams, scans Twitter (now, of course, X) and doodles tiny penises in her notebook. Later, she will hand off any actual work she has been asked to do to the students she is teaching in a course in “a master’s program at a private university that hired me thanks to the English diploma I listed on LinkedIn” (10), passing off the task as an assignment for academic credit. 

Her students at least are still eager and enthusiasm. Marisa is long past jaded: “I’ve been doing the same thing for eight years, and I know it doesn’t help anyone. I know the world would be a better place if jobs like mine didn’t exist” (8). She once wanted to be an artist or a curator–she studied Art History at university, and still likes to tour the Prado when she takes one of her many midday breaks, playing hooky while still on the agency’s clock. She originally took her job as a temporary thing, staying on in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis because “the advertising world seemed safer and more reliable than the hypothetical and increasingly distant world of art. I guess I made the wrong decision. Or maybe, between the possibility of being happier and buying more things, I chose to buy more things” (17). After all, she has bills to pay. And it is nice to be able to take off at short notice for a week or two to the Canary Islands. Any residual anxiety can be dealt with by popping Lorezapam (Ativan) a few times a day.

Indeed, her life is hardly all dismal. She has enough money, few commitments (no children or partner, but a guy in her building is a regular “friend with benefits”), stable employment, and sufficient distance from the demands of her employment that she is happy to see it as a performance or a game: “Work is just a role you play and I’ve mastered it perfectly. [. . .] I know what to say to make the time flow faster, without actually doing anything, until I can go home at six” (6). She may well be alienated, but she knows it (no illusions), and she is not exactly mining coal or being sent up chimneys. She does not really care whether her agency does well or otherwise, and she knows how to keep up the pretense that she is contributing willingly and productively to whatever success it may have.

The worst she has to endure is the vacuous small talk and naïve sloganeering of her colleagues (“teamwork makes the dream work” [25]). And she has at least one co-worker, Rita, who thinks much the same as herself, and they can entertain themselves by rolling eyes at each other during meetings. At the end of the day, rather than feeling downtrodden or oppressed, Marisa feels that she has “tricked capitalism for one more day” (27). After all, Capital has hardly appropriated much if any of her labor power. And what would she be doing otherwise? She spends most of her spare time (and much of her “work” time, too) watching YouTube videos.

She does recognize, however, that this is a game that is not without victims, even if she is not one herself. She indulges in a measure of hypocrisy that we might call post-post-feminist. She has, after all, (she tells us) read her way through the feminist canon: “Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Virginia Woolf, Kate Millett, Silvia Federici, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, Virginie Despentes. None of that matters” (29). Not only does she still shave her legs and buy expensive face cream, she is called in to shield her company from accusations of sexism, such as when she helps come up with a “sorry not sorry” apology for an ill-advised tweet made by a freelancer on their social media team. She has “been branded the office feminist who needs to be consulted on all gender-equity issues. I’m a token; what I read outside of work and the fundamental beliefs I fight for when I’m not too tired are used by the company to improve their image” (29). “A part of me is disgusted,” she admits, “like I’m betraying my gender” (61).

But (bull)shit gets a bit more real when Rita, who is if anything even more “discontent” than Marisa, stops coming in to work and is found to have died, perhaps by suicide. No longer is Marisa simply “betraying” an abstract concept such as “gender.” Now perhaps a real, flesh and blood person–although hardly a “friend,” as she realizes how little she knows of Rita’s life outside of work–has literalized the daily “dehuman[ization]” (49) that Marisa otherwise keeps at bay through humor and irony. It is a struggle to admit to herself that perhaps humor is not enough, and that maybe she is not “trick[ing] capitalism.” It is almost unimaginable that she might admit this to anyone else, though she fantasizes about telling her mother: 

Mom, I don’t think I’m doing OK. I don’t think anyone is entirely OK, but I think I’m a little worse than the rest. I don’t think I’m as bad as a girl I knew, named Rita, who I never told you about, but who I think killed herself. Or maybe she didn’t. Goes to show you how well I knew her. Mom, I want to escape, I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to live this life. (129–30)

Discontent could, then, be written as tragedy, but though it definitely makes some serious points and lets off some shrewd and cutting barbs, for the most part it is cast as comedy (it is indeed often very funny), and ultimately as farce. It culminates with a company retreat, which is of course the very epitome and culmination of corporate ridiculousness (as also in the magnificent recent TV show Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat). Here, much bitter fun is made of the fact that Marisa’s boss wants her to help him find a speaker who would be “maybe a woman who can empower other women, but also men.” She considers what to answer:

I think about talks on the wage gap, on why women leave their careers to take care of their children, or on the mental burden of housework. I think about talks on destroying gender, sex, the patriarchy. I think about talks on sexism in the workplace, on the need for better applied policies on equality or on companies’ lack of real commitment to equity. I know that’s not what Ramón is looking for. (61)

In the end, Marisa herself speaks at the retreat, but rather than making the broad social commentary that she briefly envisages for the occasion, instead (spoiler alert) she takes the occasion as an excuse to spike her colleagues’ drinks with MDMA (Molly, Ecstasy). This is all very funny (it briefly reminded me of novels such as Kingsley Amis’s classic satire, Lucky Jim), not least the brief coda to this event which consists of a series of emails around the ensuing “internal investigation team-building retreat” (155), all of which are interspersed with Marisa’s automatic out-of-office reply, as she herself has blithely jetted off to Fuerteventura. But it is not exactly a critique. After all, isn’t the point that her colleagues (and maybe also the people who buy the wares that they all hawk) are already basically drugged, pictured here as zombies enthusiastically embracing the banal rewards of consumer capitalism?

But I guess the idea is that sobriety–or the cynicism and even feminist-informed self-knowledge that Marisa, for instance, instantiates–is no alibi. Surely, most of us do already know that work is shit; Marisa is far less of an outlier than she seems to think she is. We can be knowingly complicit or unknowingly so. Either way, simply knowing (however much disillusion and discontent go with it) is not enough.

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Little Eyes: Remote Control and Controlled

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Jon

At the very end of Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes (2018), there is a mention of a young boy “staring at his own reflection on [a] black screen” (239). The book’s resonance with the TV series, Black Mirror, could hardly be clearer. As with Charlie Brooker’s show, Schewblin’s novel takes technology, especially the screens with which we are in constant interaction, as a point of departure for examining our all too (post)human foibles and frailties.

Also like Black Mirror, the innovation at the center of this book is hardly very far removed from what we already have with us. No jet packs, flying cars, or hyperdrive here. A “kentuki” is a digital pet or toy, not so different from the Tamagotchi that were briefly all the rage just before the turn of the millennium, perhaps crossed with the Furbies that came out around the same time. They are semi-autonomous digital robots dressed up with the accoutrements of an animal (rabbit, owl, crow, dragon. . .), for which their owners feel a sense of responsibility, and with which they can establish rather primitive communication. They can scurry around on built-in wheels but have no limbs and cannot climb, and they make noises such as squeaks or purring sounds, but cannot speak. 

The difference is that with a kentuki, there is a real live human being at the other end, controlling the creature’s movements via an Internet connection. Moreover, via a camera built into the kentuki’s little eyes, they can see you, but you cannot see them. So if you buy a kentuki, you can choose either to purchase the object itself, of which you become a “keeper,” or to buy a code that establishes a connection with and the means to operate someone else’s object, of which you thereby become a “dweller.” 

There is one connection, and one connection only, between dweller and keeper, which is broken if the dweller chooses to break it, or if the keeper either lets the thing run out of battery or otherwise disables or destroys it. Moreover, nobody gets to choose whose dweller or keeper they become: the pairings are randomly established, and could well cross cultures and continents. The dweller has a built-in on-screen translation so that they can understand a keeper’s instructions, or eavesdrop on their conversations with others. It is much harder for a keeper to receive any kind of message from a dweller, and in the book we find characters resorting to various stratagems such as Ouija boards or Morse code to do so. But while keepers tend to want to speak to and hear from the “other side” inhabited by dwellers, a dweller cannot be compelled to respond, and may well take advantage of the fundamental opacity of their role to be simply a silent voyeur of a keeper’s life. One can already imagine some of the ways in which things can go wrong.

The novel interlaces the disconnected stories of a variety of different kentukis, sometimes from the point of view of the dweller, sometimes from that of the keeper. It thereby criss-crosses the globe, establishing parallels or direct connections between cities or city pairs that lend their names to chapter titles: Lima, Barcelona, Zagreb, Beijing, Lyon, Umbertide (Italy), Antigua (Guatemala), even Vancouver (Canada). Some cities are the setting merely for brief vignettes that either break off or do not go anywhere in particular. In other cities, longer narrations develop with a number of twists and turns as either keeper or dweller develops new perspectives on their experience, but suffice it to say that they rarely end well. 

Again as in Black Mirror, a gadget initially envisaged as improving people’s lives (by providing companionship to the lonely, for instance, or allowing people to travel the world from their bedrooms) ends up complicating and even ruining them in unforeseen (if not entirely unpredictable) ways. We soon run into issues of ethics (can a keeper be accused of “abusing” their dweller? What if anything does a dweller “owe” their keeper?) and also politics (should the kentukis be “liberated” from their keepers?). Questions of epistemology (what can we “know” of what is behind the screen) and perhaps above all affect also abound. People may after all know that these are mere toys, whichever side of the screen they find ourselves on, but they soon become subject to or provoke love, desire, jealousy, suspicion, fear, anxiety, and so on. Even though dwellers cannot “feel,” the kentukis’ tactility comes to the fore, both when keepers are drawn to pet (rub, scratch, caress) their creatures, and when, for instance, a dweller from the tropics sets his kentuki on a mission to touch and even plunge into Arctic snow.

Through these little machines, subjects and selves become fragmented and globally dispersed in technological proxies and prostheses, re-embodiments that feel as real (or realer) than the sites where what one character calls the “brutish hunk[s] of meat” (92) that are our biological bodies actually reside. But all this is hardly science fiction. As with Black Mirror, we quickly grasp that Little Eyes is a reflection of a current condition that has been with us for some time.

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A Girl Returned: Mothers, Sisters, Strawberries

Posted on July 3, 2026 by Jon

Donatella Di Pietrantonio’s A Girl Returned (2017) reminded me of a host of similar novels, though it also has much that is original and striking of its own. Its opening scene, for instance, has echoes (deliberate or otherwise) with the way that Carmen Laforet’s Spanish classic, Nada (1945), begins. In both, we see an adolescent girl struggling up steps with a loaded suitcase to an unfamiliar apartment where (for reasons that are not fully explained) she will spend the next year or so with relatives she has never previously met, who strike her, at first at least, as hostile and even monstrous. In both cases, the host family is impoverished, and there is much emphasis on food (or its lack). But there are also strange psychological tensions and a disturbing erotic undercurrent, especially around a strong-willed older male figure who never quite fits his environment and then dramatically dies–in Laforet’s novel, at the tale’s conclusion; in Di Pietrantonio’s, more like halfway through. The protagonist is only able to negotiate all these difficulties as she becomes friends with a female figure of about the same age, who teaches her lessons in resilience and resistance.

The twist in A Girl Returned is that the family to whose strange ways the unnamed narrator has to adapt is in fact her own birth family. (In Nada, the equivalent household is packed instead with uncles and aunts.) For it turns out that she has been living with, and formally or informally adopted by, an aunt or uncle. But when the story opens, she has been forced out of that arrangement (because, she believes, her adoptive mother is ill, perhaps terminally) and is returned to a set of biological parents and siblings that she has never known. Moreover, in a test of in the influence of nurture versus nature, her aunt and uncle had raised her in a life of relative privilege, of urban sophistication, ballet lessons, and beach clubs by the sea. Her “real” family, by contrast, live hand to mouth in a much smaller town, speak dialect rather than standard Italian, are crowded in a single bedroom with only a flimsy partition to separate the young from the adult, and the children drop out of school early as they are expected to help in the constant effort to put food on the table.

If Carmen Laforet is a possible forbear for Di Pietrantonio, it is also impossible to ignore the shadow of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet (likewise translated by Ann Goldstein), whose female narrator similarly looks back on a youth marked by economic hardship, with scholastic success the apparent key to social mobility. But if Ferrante’s novels revolve around a “brilliant friend” (“amica genial”), here it is the narrator’s new-found younger sister, Adriana, who calls the narrator a “genius of verbs” (78) and is subsequently in turn described as “a genius, that Adriana” (133). (It must be admitted, however, that almost any novel is bound to suffer in a comparison with My Brilliant Friend. Di Pietrantonio’s is not a bad book, but it does not have the texture and finely-judged ambivalence sustained at such length by Ferrante’s magnum opus.)

A Girl Returned is perhaps most interesting for what it has to say about memory and forgetting. Like both Nada and My Brilliant Friend, its story is told by a narrator who is recounting her experience at a much later date. (We are teased with fleeting references to what must have happened in the meantime: her youngest brother is now in an institution, for instance; Adriana may soon be getting married.) As such, she reviews and reflects on the gap between what she realizes now and what she did not know then. Thinking back, for instance, she is kinder and less judgemental towards her biological parents than she was at the time. She is drawn to moments of light amidst what was often darkness and even violence: “Every so often I think again,” for example she tells us, “of the hand of the first [mother] that for a few moments rested on my shoulder, at school. I still wonder why she placed it there, a woman so sparing of caresses” (129). Ferrante’s narrator–if we have to make the comparison–is by contrast much less forgiving of her own mother, even if she can similarly see that the older woman’s defects are the result of a struggle against a harsh and inhospitable environment for women of her class and [lack of] social status.

Softened perhaps by memory and time passing, Di Pietrantonio’s narrator is even surprisingly generous towards an older brother who is a hair’s breadth (or less) from taking advantage of her sexually. She is saved only by his sudden accidental death. Yet at the very end of the book (on its penultimate page) there is a moment of solemn mourning, as the narrator and her sister “silently [. . .] remember [. . .] him” (179) at the very beach where he had first acted on his incestuous desire, kissing her open-mouthed (53). One would have thought this would be something the narrator would want to forget.

But her greatest fear is to be forgotten. Even as she is with her biological family, she continually hopes that she may be reunited with her former mother, and has to believe that she has not been forgotten by her. She clings on to the hope that, even if her adoptive mother is not in touch with her, this must be for some good reason–perhaps because she is in hospital; or even because she is dead. If she is alive, however, she must surely be thinking about her “lost” daughter, and at some point will come to take her back. But she is not always able to sustain this hope: “In certain melancholy moods, I felt forgotten. I’d fallen out of her thoughts. There was no longer any reason to exist in the world. I softly repeated the word mamma a hundred times, until it lost all meaning and was only an exercise of the lips” (115). And when the narrator learns the true reason why she was “returned” to her biological family–her adoptive mother, who previously thought herself infertile, gets pregnant–the worst thing she can imagine doing in revenge is to erase her erstwhile mother from her memory: “I immediately decided not to see her Again [. . .]. I truly lost her, and for a few hours I thought I could forget her” (128).

Of course, she cannot fully forget, and by the novel’s end, after a rather excruciating dinner, she can see her adoptive mother as herself a victim, constrained by rules to which she only unwillingly agrees. More generally, at last the narrator seems able to let go of motherhood entirely, and certainly the idealization of mothers. It seems significant that, so far as we can tell, the narrator has not had any children. Mothers cannot protect you–if anything, whatever their best intentions, they only make things worse. It is thanks to her “alliance” with her sister that the two of them are said, at the book’s conclusion, to have “survived” (170). And together, the two sisters care for their disadvantaged younger brother, visiting him regularly, bringing him strawberries: “Then he eats them, after holding them up to the light, one by one, gripping them by the stem. He observes the tiny variations in shape, in color. I suspect that he’s trying to count all those seeds on the surface” (113). These are the relationships, and these the observations of detail and minor difference, that ultimately matter. This, perhaps, is what is worth remembering for Di Pietrantonio.

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