English 103-01 – Studies in Contemporary Literature – Kim Minkus
What happens to literature when it no longer looks or feels the way we expect it to? Modernist and post modernist writers have already taken apart traditional narrative, typography and form, but with the advent of the World Wide Web this unraveling has accelerated. This course will look at the works of Canadian writers who write the “undone narrative.” We will also explore the work of Canadian fiction writers and poets whose inventive work either crosses over to other genres, intersects with the visual arts, “adapts” or “translates” language, or breaks new ground using technology. This course includes a critical component and the option of creative work. Discussion, in-class activities, and written responses to our reading are important elements of this course.

Required Texts:
• TBA

English 104-01 – Contemporary Fiction – Vicky Ross
What will you learn about love, while reading a story by Anton Chekhov, the great Russian dramatist? What will you discover about intimacy when a lonely designer marries a woman with a clothes fetish, in a tale by Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami? How will your understanding of public and private worlds be changed when exploring a family nightmare from the perspective of an urban youth, in a novel by Nigeria’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche? This course will expose you to short fiction and novels that will terrify and entertain, sharpen your world-view and develop your powers of expression, as we travel between fantasy and reality, from Europe to the Pacific Rim and beyond.

Required Texts:
• TBA

English 104-02 – Contemporary Fiction – Anne Stone
This section of Contemporary Fiction introduces students to the hauntings and longings that mark the works of contemporary writers. In these recent novels, fear and desire find unique incarnation: In Beloved, we witness the ghostly reincarnation of a lost relation; and in Soucouyant, an uncanny folk figure from Caribbean lore -- an old woman who, by night, takes off her wrinkled skin and flies through the darkness in the form of a fire-ball -- haunts our understanding of the past. Along our journey, we'll also read a selection of innovative contemporary short fictions.

Required Texts:
• Chariandy, David. Soucouyant. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp, 2007.
• Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Toronto: Vintage, 2004.
• Course package. Ed. Anne Stone. North Vancouver: Capilano, 2010.

English 104-03 – Contemporary Fiction – Carlos Reyes
Why do people love both telling and hearing stories? Can the attraction of fiction be attributed entirely to its entertainment value, or does fiction provide tangible benefits to storytellers as well as audiences? In this course, we will read a diverse range of texts—from children’s books to graphic novels and experimental writing—to explore both how fiction has been useful to humans in the past, and how it might be useful to us now as twenty-first century global citizens navigating the uncertain terrain of the present.

Required Texts:
• Barry, Lynda. One Hundred Demons. Seattle: Sasquatch, 2005.
• Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories. Cambridge: Belknap, 2009.
• Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red. New York: Vintage, 1998.
• Clowes, Dan. Ice Haven. New York: Pantheon, 2005.
• Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. New York: Vintage, 2004.
• Tamaki, Mariko and Steve Rolston. Emiko Superstar. New York: DC Comics, 2008.
• Dr. Seuss. Horton Hears a Who! New York: Random House, 1954.
• Sfarr, Joann. The Rabbi’s Cat. New York: Pantheon, 2007.

Top

English 190-01 – Creative Writing I – Ryan Knighton
In English 191 we will continue to develop our skills as writers by asking how writing can be made, not what it might mean. Specifically, we will further engage with questions of poetry, microfiction, and so-called creative non-fiction, as directed by their form and history. Our workshops are neither roundtable editing sessions, nor, worse, copyediting boot camps. Rather, we will share draft examples of our own work in order to further our discussions, to expose new questions, and to seek the effects of craft. Some case examples from published works will be provided in class, but our own writing will serve as the primary texts. So will Stephen king’s memoir, On Writing, which is pretty damned fine. By the final class, students should have at least one reworked submission of writing ready for a magazine or periodical. To that end we will survey some of the nuts-and-bolts of pitching and publishing, too.

Required Texts:
• TBA

English 211-01 – Studies in Short Fiction – Brian Ganter
Reading Detective Fiction

From Sherlock Holmes to Veronica Mars and Miss Marple to Dexter; from Phillip Marlow to Easy Rawlins and Edgar Allen Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” to Frank Miller’s Sin City, detective (or “crime”) fiction continues to be one the most enduring forms of genre fiction. This course is both an introduction and a critical response to this popular, yet frequently maligned, genre. After a short introduction to the origins and early conventions of the form in the work of Poe and a brief survey of its “golden age” (Doyle, Chesterton, Sayers, Dostoevsky) we will turn directly to dynamic changes within the genre in the mid- and late-twentieth century. Working within this courses’ mandate to focus on short works, we will look at short fiction and short stories in post-War detective “noir,” “hard-boiled” P.I.s, as well as more recent developments, including “serial killer” stories and the crossover science-fiction work of Phillip K. Dick (the writer behind the film Blade Runner). Critical readings will supplement the fictional works to pose an important question: does the obsessive popularity of detective and crime stories emerge from the fact that the “solutions” offered to its mysteries actually “conceal” and “mystify” more about our culture than they ultimately “reveal?”


Required Texts:
• Course Reader with selections of short fiction/criticism and others TBA

Top