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A Tribute to Stephen King
To say that Stephen King is a good writer would be an understatement. With nearly 100 books selling over 350 million copies and stories transformed into television series and movies that have left an indelible mark on our pop culture, Stephen King is a capital “G” Great writer. I paid a visit to one of the Vancouver Writer’s Festival events called, “A Tribute to Stephen King,” and found myself in a room filled with people all with the same question: How? How exactly can a single man accomplish all of this? And more importantly, what has Stephen King taught us from his stories? The night started with a healthy sprinkling…
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Colloquium 2020: Call for Editors!
Interested in gaining editing experience? Looking to take part in an enriching academic conference? The ESA is looking for editors to assist with the 2020 Colloquium! Editors will have a hand in selecting the pieces that will be presented at the conference, as well as work closely with those selected to refine their work. Some basic criteria: Student at UBC (all majors and years are welcome!) Exemplary communication and writing skills Interest in engaging with writers at UBC Open to providing and receiving constructive feedback Strong sense of time management Able to attend the Colloquium on February 28th Willingness to take initiative (e.g. punctual for meetings, full of ideas, ready…
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Society’s Biggest Joke: Put on a Happy Face
Both heroes and anti-heroes share a common goal in life to find his or her form of happiness by conquering any problem he or she faces to achieve his or her goal. In Todd Phillips’ film, Joker (2019), the audience is challenged to perceive the protagonist Arthur Fleck, a party clown and failed comedian, as an example of an anti-hero. Arthur struggles to keep his job as a street advertiser who holds and flips signs on the sidewalk for local merchants while dressed as a clown. He works hard to keep his job and to maintain a positive mindset to afford to live in Gotham City with his mother, Penny Fleck. He…
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The Strength To Move Mountains
Literature provides us with some of the strongest women in the history of fiction. The connections that form between the reader and the characters can be felt on a deep and personal level. But what does it mean for a female character to be “strong”? What and how can we learn from these characters about being or becoming strong? We must first examine the definition of strength. In the ancient world, the standard for strength often favoured a certain kind of man. Many writers today still fall back on the idolization of traditional masculinity, and consequently create female characters that embody masculine traits, characteristics, personalities, and interests. However, because the…
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The Burden of Being: Exhaustion as Praxis in ‘Intersectional’ Academia
UBC is an alarmingly inaccessible campus. It was when I began my undergraduate degree on crutches, it continued to be when I transitioned to a cane, and occasionally still is now that I am mobility-aid free in my daily life. Navigating the campus as a freshman is difficult enough, but when construction projects block accessible routes from class buildings to the bus loops; ledges or other obstacles stand in the way of ramps and elevators; bathrooms are located on different floors than classrooms and only through darkened stairwells; and winter travel is obstructed by un-shoveled snow turning into unsalted ice through major campus corridors, my overwhelming first-year fear of conspicuous lateness…
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Deadly Diction: Examining Emerging Medical Anxieties in “The Body-Snatcher”
Part of the appeal of studying literature in university is bearing witness to the human experience through the centuries. Victorian gothic literature explores a variety of emerging anxieties, and the emergence of medicine as both a profession and an authority throughout the nineteenth century became intertwined with gothic literature. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas argues that nineteenth-century gothic literature was both a vessel for spreading knowledge about emerging medicine, and a means through which the public could engage with it in “‘I Have Bottled Babes Unborn’: The Gothic, Medical Collections and Victorian Popular Culture.” Talairach-Vielmas explores the propagation of knowledge and documentation of public reactions in gothic literature by way of a wide…
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“Ink and Red Dye”: How Poe ‘Fridges’ His Women
“The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” — Edgar Allan Poe, The Poetic Principle Poe’s treatment of women, throughout his stories, can be directly tied back to this claim and its implication that women’s lives are determined and valued based on their poetical use. A similar concept can be seen in a more recent pop culture understanding of how women’s lives are valued: that of “fridging.” Coined in part by a letter written to comics writer Gail Simone, the term essentially refers to “any character who is targeted by an antagonist who has killed them off, abused… incapacitated, or de-powered for the…
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The 2020 Colloquium!
The English Students’ Association is hosting our sixth annual academic conference, The Colloquium! This conference features presentations from English undergraduate students and faculty members. The Colloquium offers the opportunity to share your work and discuss ideas with other students and faculty members in the English Department. Please see below for more detailed information! Event Information Time: 4:00pm – 7:00pm Date: February 27th, 2020 Location: Dodson Room, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre RSVP: on Facebook! The event schedule, along with the presenters’ abstracts, will be released closer to the event date. Presenters and Abstracts Dr. Lise Gaston Reading Carriages in the Eighteenth-Century Novel Using Frances Burney’s 1778 novel Evelina as a case study,…
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“A salvatory of green mummy”: John Webster and Corpse Medicine
Jacobean dramatist John Webster approached the taboo and the questionable with inexhaustible determination, plunging the contemporary reader into those dark, uncomfortable spaces we prefer to skirt around, never lingering for too long for fear of what we might uncover. For Webster, a preoccupation with the gruesome side of mortality manifests particularly strongly in his references to the practice of mummy, or corpse medicine (tinctures made from dead human flesh and bones), in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. Contrary to such a perceivably unthinkable medical practice being attributed to British “medieval” history, corpse medicine continued to be practiced well into the early modern period, where it reached its height of popularity…
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Aconite and mandrake: Crypto-pharmacological botanicals in Shakespeare
Don’t try these remedies at home, kids, no matter how reputable Shakespeare’s local apothecary might seem.
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Celebrating Women in Literature
Although many women have not received adequate acknowledgement or recognition for their works, their ideas and writings continue to be fundamental.
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Galileo in a Different Light
Brecht created the character of Galileo to reflect on the actual scientist’s impact in the past and the world as we know it today, exemplifying how a great discovery does not always mean change for the better.
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Festival Dionysia: A Review
A cacophony settled by stillness, despair tempered by hope, Festival Dionysia lays bare the humanity of its characters and its audience. In a whirlwind of motion and storylines, six plays come together to celebrate the truly brilliant platform that is the UBC Players Club.
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“The Loveliest Lies of All”: Adapting Folk and Fairy Tale Functions in “Over the Garden Wall”
“If dreams can’t come true, then why not pretend?” asks the narrator of Patrick McHale’s animated series Over the Garden Wall, offering a partially hopeful, partially haunting message to guide the viewer through the whimsical, eerie, and complex process and history of adapting folk and fairy tales.
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A Little Wonder for a Frantic Soul: Faye Hanson’s Picture Book “The Wonder”
After I read The Wonder, which is written and wonderfully (pun intended) illustrated by Faye Hanson, the word “wonder” has spiralled into a complex living, breathing creature which harbours unfathomable potential under its layers of fur.
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Destiny and Free Will: The Wicked Day of Chance
Death closes all: but something ere the end, Some work of noble note, may yet be done, Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. — Lord Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses” Fate’s threads entangle all in an infinite web, unbeknownst to the players of the tragedy. What happens when a character is aware of his fate and acts towards preventing it? Can destiny, with all its predetermined points in time, be altered? Mary Stewart’s The Wicked Day (2003) tells the story of Mordred, as he struggles to fight against the prophecy of King Arthur’s death by his hands. Mordred’s life begins and ends with Arthur. Oblivious to their family connection,…
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ESA Elections 2019!
Looking for a fun opportunity to get involved with the English undergraduate community while developing leadership skills? We are officially seeking executives for next year’s ESA.
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Betwixt and between psychoanalysis and liminal theory: A liminal approach to Neil Gaiman’s Coraline
Within the liminal phase, Coraline finds herself in what Turner coins as “a ‘moment in and out of time’” (The Ritual Process 96), in which spatio-temporal boundaries and the constraints of state no longer apply when there are no boundaries or states to be had in the first place.
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Why I Chose to Study English and What I Have Learned
To me, it seemed that writing was magical, borderless; writers had the power to transcend history and reach across different nations, affecting a multitude of people.
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4 Colour Commentary: Images of Racism in a 1950s American Comic Book
EC Comics, perhaps best-known today as the company behind Mad Magazine, spent the 1950s producing some of the most subversive and contentious comic books in history. These comics were remarkably cognizant of the social issues of their time, containing parabolic stories that dealt with anti-Semitism and Jim Crow laws while Batman was still trading blows with the Penguin. Though not conventionally considered to be works of literature, many of these comics contain the same fundamental division between form and content that books do, and can be subjected to literary analyses. More importantly, they are visual as much as they are textual; this added dimension compensates for their – admittedly –…
