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Home / Profiles / Sang Wu

Sang Wu

Sessional Lecturer
email sang.wu@ubc.ca
phone 604 822 6243
location_on Buchanan Tower - BuTo 220
Research / Teaching Area
WRDS (Writing Studies)

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in English at Cornell University. My research focuses on Romanticism, deconstruction, and discourses of knowledge. I am currently completing a dissertation which reads the figures and syntax of Romantic literary and theoretical texts to rethink how their formal elements structure–and resist structuring–epistemological discourses of knowledge about the unknown, the accidental, the non-referential, the contingent. It reimagines how the knowing of not knowing (including the chance encounters through which language comes to signify the foreign, the monstrous, the nonhuman, and death) is to be known. Other interests include psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, trauma studies, and the intellectual history of theory. At the heart of my work lies a sustained attentiveness to the referentially reflexive relation between self and world, language and its conditions of possibility.

Before joining Writing, Research and Discourse Studies, I taught courses in genre fiction, in cultural studies, and academic writing in the Cornell Prison Education Program.

Teaching

Additional Description

The Anthropocene
This course introduces students to academic reading and writing through analysis of scholarly discourses in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We will focus our investigation on climate change and other global crises, and issues of responsibility concerning them, in the era of the Anthropocene. Coined at the turn of the 21st century, the word is compounded from the Greek anthropos (“human”) and kainos (“new”). The Anthropocene is the new epoch of humans: one in which planetary conditions are shaped by human activity rather than vice versa, humankind as a force of geological agency has overtaken physical geography and natural history, and the familiar distinction between man and nature no longer holds. A closer look at the scientific and semantic implications of the term, however, reveals it to be less straightforward than initially appears. Currently not officially recognized as part of the Geologic Time Scale, what should be understood or measured as the basis for the Anthropocene means different things to different disciplines. How do scholars from fields as diverse as geology, climatology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology, engage with the common idea of the Anthropocene? Do studies of pre-industrial greenhouse gas emissions, critiques of environmentally unsustainable trends of industrial, socioeconomic, and technological acceleration in an age of world capitalism, and theories of the end of human history at the limits of human “meaning” and modernity, ask similar research questions despite starkly contrastive methodologies? How are the discursive challenges posed by referring to singular abstractions (e.g., humans as a “species,” the sense of a “universal” history or geostory, the “Anthropocene”) represented across multiple disciplines, reflective of the conceptual difficulties which arise in accessing or preserving a nature no longer distinguishable from the human interventions that create and destroy it? How is our sense of what it means to be natural objects or human subjects, and what it means not to be, informed by how our discourses produce meaning?
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About
Teaching
Additional Description

Sang Wu

Sessional Lecturer
email sang.wu@ubc.ca
phone 604 822 6243
location_on Buchanan Tower - BuTo 220
Research / Teaching Area
WRDS (Writing Studies)

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in English at Cornell University. My research focuses on Romanticism, deconstruction, and discourses of knowledge. I am currently completing a dissertation which reads the figures and syntax of Romantic literary and theoretical texts to rethink how their formal elements structure–and resist structuring–epistemological discourses of knowledge about the unknown, the accidental, the non-referential, the contingent. It reimagines how the knowing of not knowing (including the chance encounters through which language comes to signify the foreign, the monstrous, the nonhuman, and death) is to be known. Other interests include psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, trauma studies, and the intellectual history of theory. At the heart of my work lies a sustained attentiveness to the referentially reflexive relation between self and world, language and its conditions of possibility.

Before joining Writing, Research and Discourse Studies, I taught courses in genre fiction, in cultural studies, and academic writing in the Cornell Prison Education Program.

Teaching

Additional Description

The Anthropocene
This course introduces students to academic reading and writing through analysis of scholarly discourses in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We will focus our investigation on climate change and other global crises, and issues of responsibility concerning them, in the era of the Anthropocene. Coined at the turn of the 21st century, the word is compounded from the Greek anthropos (“human”) and kainos (“new”). The Anthropocene is the new epoch of humans: one in which planetary conditions are shaped by human activity rather than vice versa, humankind as a force of geological agency has overtaken physical geography and natural history, and the familiar distinction between man and nature no longer holds. A closer look at the scientific and semantic implications of the term, however, reveals it to be less straightforward than initially appears. Currently not officially recognized as part of the Geologic Time Scale, what should be understood or measured as the basis for the Anthropocene means different things to different disciplines. How do scholars from fields as diverse as geology, climatology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology, engage with the common idea of the Anthropocene? Do studies of pre-industrial greenhouse gas emissions, critiques of environmentally unsustainable trends of industrial, socioeconomic, and technological acceleration in an age of world capitalism, and theories of the end of human history at the limits of human “meaning” and modernity, ask similar research questions despite starkly contrastive methodologies? How are the discursive challenges posed by referring to singular abstractions (e.g., humans as a “species,” the sense of a “universal” history or geostory, the “Anthropocene”) represented across multiple disciplines, reflective of the conceptual difficulties which arise in accessing or preserving a nature no longer distinguishable from the human interventions that create and destroy it? How is our sense of what it means to be natural objects or human subjects, and what it means not to be, informed by how our discourses produce meaning?

Sang Wu

Sessional Lecturer
email sang.wu@ubc.ca
phone 604 822 6243
location_on Buchanan Tower - BuTo 220
Research / Teaching Area
WRDS (Writing Studies)
About keyboard_arrow_down

I am a Ph.D. candidate in English at Cornell University. My research focuses on Romanticism, deconstruction, and discourses of knowledge. I am currently completing a dissertation which reads the figures and syntax of Romantic literary and theoretical texts to rethink how their formal elements structure–and resist structuring–epistemological discourses of knowledge about the unknown, the accidental, the non-referential, the contingent. It reimagines how the knowing of not knowing (including the chance encounters through which language comes to signify the foreign, the monstrous, the nonhuman, and death) is to be known. Other interests include psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, trauma studies, and the intellectual history of theory. At the heart of my work lies a sustained attentiveness to the referentially reflexive relation between self and world, language and its conditions of possibility.

Before joining Writing, Research and Discourse Studies, I taught courses in genre fiction, in cultural studies, and academic writing in the Cornell Prison Education Program.

Teaching keyboard_arrow_down
Additional Description keyboard_arrow_down
The Anthropocene
This course introduces students to academic reading and writing through analysis of scholarly discourses in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. We will focus our investigation on climate change and other global crises, and issues of responsibility concerning them, in the era of the Anthropocene. Coined at the turn of the 21st century, the word is compounded from the Greek anthropos (“human”) and kainos (“new”). The Anthropocene is the new epoch of humans: one in which planetary conditions are shaped by human activity rather than vice versa, humankind as a force of geological agency has overtaken physical geography and natural history, and the familiar distinction between man and nature no longer holds. A closer look at the scientific and semantic implications of the term, however, reveals it to be less straightforward than initially appears. Currently not officially recognized as part of the Geologic Time Scale, what should be understood or measured as the basis for the Anthropocene means different things to different disciplines. How do scholars from fields as diverse as geology, climatology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology, engage with the common idea of the Anthropocene? Do studies of pre-industrial greenhouse gas emissions, critiques of environmentally unsustainable trends of industrial, socioeconomic, and technological acceleration in an age of world capitalism, and theories of the end of human history at the limits of human “meaning” and modernity, ask similar research questions despite starkly contrastive methodologies? How are the discursive challenges posed by referring to singular abstractions (e.g., humans as a “species,” the sense of a “universal” history or geostory, the “Anthropocene”) represented across multiple disciplines, reflective of the conceptual difficulties which arise in accessing or preserving a nature no longer distinguishable from the human interventions that create and destroy it? How is our sense of what it means to be natural objects or human subjects, and what it means not to be, informed by how our discourses produce meaning?