Graduate Studies
Literatures of the West Coast
Follow the Literatures of the West Coast Twitter stream.
Download J. Edward Chamberlin's essay for the Founding Lectures in Literatures of the West Coast series here.
Literatures of the West Coast is a lively, productive research cluster composed of faculty and students engaged in a range of innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to the literary cultures of the Pacific regions of Canada and the United States. Started in 2007, this program is committed to leading the way in the literary study of the West Coast in local, national, and global contexts.
Recent program highlights include Founding Lectures from David Li and J. Edward Chamberlin.
Literatures of the West Coast is also a concentration within the Department's M.A. program: it offers a coherent path of course work and mentorship in order to provide students with the necessary intellectual framework for their research projects.
The M.A. concentration in Literatures of the West Coast brings into productive dialogue the several traditions that have constituted the literary on the West Coast: Indigenous, British, American, Asian and Canadian. Rather than following the historical and geographical contours that typically define "English" as a discipline, Literatures of the West Coast examines the history of boundaries and the boundaries of history. The concept of the "literary" comes under scrutiny, as does the division between oral and written, the notion of tradition, and the cultural work performed by literature when conceived of as the expression of regions, nations, peoples, environments, and other complex forms of social space. The concentration offers students the opportunity to pursue their research interests in one of several directions, including indigenous literatures; transnational writing; literature, space, and the environment; or a comparative study of any of the constitutive traditions of the West Coast.
The concentration consists of the Core Seminar in Literatures of the West Coast (topics addressed in the seminar include Borders and Regions; Historiographies; Pacific Diasporas, Migrations, and Nations; Identity and Place), and a series of optional courses in the area. Please see below for recent course offerings.
Participating Faculty and Research Interests
Nicholas Bradley: Ecocriticism; Literatures of the West Coast
Misao Dean: British Columbia Literature and Canadian Literature; Museum Culture; Canoes and Canadian Culture; Asian North American Writing
Jamie Dopp: Poetry of the West Coast; The Tish Group
Christopher Douglas: American Multi-Ethnic Writing; Migration, Race, and Culture; American Literature on the Pacific; Asian North American Writing
Iain Higgins: Postcolonial Theory; Oral Literatures; Modern American and Canadian Poetry of the West Coast
Robert Miles: Theories of Nationalism; Construction of National Canons of Literature
Richard Pickard: Literature and the Environment; Literature and Labour; Literature in British Columbia
Lincoln Shlensky: Postcolonialism; Cultural Studies: U.S. Racial/Religious/Ethnic/Class Discourse; Diaspora and Immigrant Literature
Nicole Shukin: Literary and Cultural Politics of West Coast Nature; Globalization and Transnational Ecologies
Ray Siemens: Digital Humanities and Textual Culture
Selected Recent Faculty Publications
- A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
The first "unified field theory" of multicultural literature, A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism is a literary history of how we arrived at our current paradigm of writing, reading and teaching multicultural literature in the United States. It hypothesizes a three-phase development for multicultural literature from the 1920s to the 1980s, uncovering the largely unacknowledged role that social science ideas played in nourishing the politics and forms of the most canonical writers in the African American, Asian American, Mexican American and Native American traditions. A Genealogy of Literary Multiculturalism challenges the critical consensuses on the four traditions that treat each in terms of separate histories, a critical practice that has obscured the parallel phases of each tradition and the common cultural politics that generated multiculturalism's rupture with the non-pluralist literary politics that came before it. It contains chapters or sections on such important West Coast writers as Jade Snow Wong, John Okada, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, and Gloria Anzald%uFFFDa.
- Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times
(Vol. 6 in the Posthumanities Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
From the animal capital of abattoirs and automobiles, films and mobile phones, to pandemic fear of species-leaping diseases such as avian influenza and mad cow, Animal Capital makes startling linkages between visceral and virtual currencies in animal life, illuminating entanglements of species, race, and labor in the conditions of capitalism. In reckoning with the violent histories and intensifying contradictions of animal rendering, Animal Capital raises provocative and pressing questions about the cultural politics of nature.
Current and Recent Course Offerings
2010-2011
English 503, Poetry Northwest, 1950-80. Instructor: Nicholas Bradley
English 582, Core Seminar in Literatures of the West Coast. Intructors: Jamie Dopp and Richard Pickard
2009-2010
English 503, West-Coast Avant-Garde. Instructor: Nicholas Bradley
English 503, Pacific Encounters. Instructor: Iain Higgins
English 582, Core Seminar in Literatures of the West Coast. Intructors: Misao Dean and Nicholas Bradley
2008-09
English 582, Core Seminar in Literatures of the West Coast. Intructors: Misao Dean and Jamie Dopp
English 583F, Forest Fetish: Reading the Nature of the West Coast. Instructor: Nicole Shukin
English 583H: American Literature at the Pacific. Instructor: Christopher Douglas
English 583I: Literary Anthropology and Anthropological Literature on the Pacific Coast. Instructor: Nicholas Bradley
Current and Recent Graduate Student Projects
"'How Copper Was Discovered': Surfaces and Depths in a Chipewyan Myth," by Jasmine Johnston (M.A. expected 2011). Supervisor: Iain Higgins.
"David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars as a Japanese American Literary Text: The Erasure of Ethnic Identity?," by Mikiko Fukuda (M.A. 2010). Supervisor: Christoper Douglas.
"Are We Ready for a Third Nature? Intersection and Adaptation in Sustainable Building Technology," by Carolyn Krahn (M.A. 2010). Supervisor Jamie Dopp.
"Serious Play: George Bowering's Compositional Strategy and the Resulting Implications for Kerrisdale Elegies," by Amber Harper McMillan (M.A. 2010). Supervisor: Jamie Dopp.
"Imagining Cultural Place: N. Scott Momaday's Recontextualization of James Mooney's Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians," by Jennifer Huntley (M.A. 2009). Supervisor: Nicholas Bradley.
"The Corruptible Cowboy: Fight Club and the Myth of the West," by Iain Lucas (M.A. 2009). Supervisor: Christopher Douglas.
"Soil and Blood: Community in Timothy Taylor's Stanley Park and Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief," by Kate Scallion (M.A. 2009). Supervisor: Misao Dean.