|
UBC DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
John Xiros COOPER was educated at
Sir George Williams and McGill Universities in Montreal and at Queens
University in Kingston, Ontario. He took his B.A. cum laude in 1970 at
Sir George Williams and was the winner of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. After
five years working on newspapers in Montreal and on Vancouver Island, he
returned to university studies. He earned his Ph.D. in 1984 at U.B.C. Before
returning to the University in 1989, he taught English at Mount Royal College
in Calgary, Alberta (1980-89) where he not only Chaired the Department for
two years (1987-89), but also learned how to ride a horse. He specializes in
twentieth-century literature, with particular interests in poetry, the
culture of modernity, and the relationship of literature to the other arts.
He has published articles and chapters in books on T.S. Eliot, David Jones,
Andrew Suknatski, William Carlos Williams, Joseph Conrad, Ezra Pound, W. H.
Auden, early twentieth-century British fiction, modernism, and the political
impact of the poetry of the First World War. He has written four books, T.S.
Eliot and the Politics of Voice: the Argument of The Waste Land (Ann Arbor 1987), T.S.
Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets
(Cambridge 1995), Modernism
and the Culture of Market Society (Cambridge 2004), and The
Cambridge Introduction to T.S. Eliot (Cambridge 2006). He has also
authored a book-length course guide, The
Modern British Novel (Vancouver 1998). Professor Cooper is also
the editor of T.S.
Eliot's Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music (New York
2000). A long range research project, Modernism in the Mainstream: The
Case of Faber and Faber, is now nearing completion. It examines the
cultural impact of one of England’s most important publishing enterprises.
The project will not only consider Faber & Faber’s many contributions to
modern literature, but also its ground-breaking books in the visual arts,
furniture design, radio, film, dance, and music. The research is funded by a
grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. He has
also been contracted to write a short book on Modernism and the Market
for a new series called Topics in Modernism for the University of
Edinburgh Press. He anticipates completion in 2010. A study of the English
poet Lord Byron, titled Byron and Modernity,
is now in the active research stage and he has a new research initiative in
the planning stages, provisionally titled, Culture War: Ezra Pound and the
Bollingen Prize Controversy. Other interests include postmodernism and
teaching, the literature and cultural politics of the 1930s, the writings
of M.F.K. Fisher
and Elizabeth David and the work of W. B. Yeats, Geoffrey Hill, and Tony
Harrison. He occasionally contributes pieces to
newspapers and magazines on a variety of political and cultural topics. A
personal and scholarly interest in the Balkans led to his collaboration as
editor with a political leader from Bosnia-Herzegovina in the writing of a
book of memoirs about the period before and during the Bosnian Civil War in
the early 1990s. In the 2009-2010
Winter Session, he is teaching English 225 –
The Art of Poetry, English 462E
– Anglo-American Modernism, 1910-1940,
English
466B – Poetry After Modernism: Larkin,
Plath, Atwood, Walcott, and English 490 –
The American Mode of Seeing: William
Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore. His
office is in Buchanan Tower 616 and he can be reached by telephone at (604)
822-5102, by fax at (604) 822-6906 and by email at john.cooper@ubc.ca. His office hours
in Term 1 are on Mondays from 11:00AM to 1:00PM. Last
updated on June 30, 2009
|
|
|
|
