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UBC DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
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John Xiros COOPER was educated at Sir George Williams and McGill Universities in
Montreal, Quebec 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 as a newspaper reporter in
Montreal and on Vancouver Island, he returned to university studies. He
earned his Ph.D. at U.B.C in 1984. Before returning to the University in
1989, he taught English at Mount Royal College (now University) 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, Taming Modernism, is now nearing
completion. It examines the social and cultural mechanisms in the 1930s by
which major public institutions and business firms such as publishers (Faber
& Faber in London), museums of modern art (MoMA in New York), educational
institutions such as university English Departments, and world expositions
(Paris in 1938 and New York in 1939) brought modernist literary, visual, and
performance cultures into mainstream society from their origins on the
socio-economic fringes. The small magazine and the limited edition, the
coterie, the private salon and small gallery were the marginal social and
economic spaces of early modernism. For the movement to recognize itself as
what it is, namely the culture inherent to market-driven modernity,
larger-scale enterprises, such as publishing companies and museums, were
necessary to make modernism visible on a new scale as part of everyday life.
The research has been funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council. A grant-funded study of the English poet Lord Byron,
Byron and
Modernity, is now in the active research stage and Professor
Cooper has a new research initiative in the planning stages, provisionally
titled, Culture
War: Ezra Pound and the Bollingen Prize Controversy. He is also
engaged in translating from the French the Maximes morales of La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680). Other interests include postmodernism and teaching, the
literature and cultural politics of the 1930s, the writings of M.F.K. Fisher , Elizabeth David,
and Edouard de Pomiane and the work of W. B. Yeats, Geoffrey Hill, and the
New York School poets. 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 2009, his published work was awarded a Killam
Research prize. In the 2011-2012 Winter Session, he will be teaching
English 100, English 225, English 462, and English 490. 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. Last updated on March 31, 2011. |
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