- Department of English
397-1873 East mall
University of British Columbia
Vancouver BC V6T 1Z1
CANADA
- Literature and Society, English Literature, Irish (early and modern), American Literature, Modernism (Literature), Irish Literature, and 21 moreModernism, Painting, Modernity, Modernization, Food & Culture, Post-Impressionism, Charlie chaplin, Bloomsbury, Roger Fry, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Samuel Beckett, Cultural Studies, Human Geography, Cornelius Castoriadis, Modern Greece, Modern Greek History, Modern Greek Politics, Modern Greek Studies, Modern and Contemporary Greek poetry, and Modern Greek Poetryedit
- I retired from UBC in Vancouver June 2013 and moved to Europe. I've uploaded most of my published critical writing pl... moreI retired from UBC in Vancouver June 2013 and moved to Europe. I've uploaded most of my published critical writing plus a few other things. Books are more difficult to upload, but perhaps easier to get ahold of in other media. Some pieces date back to earlier computers now long gone or no computer at all. I haven't got electronic copies, which is why they haven't been uploaded.edit
A famous chef is stabbed to death in his own kitchen. Could an argument over how to bake stuffed tomatoes lead to murder? This is Greece, so anything is possible. John Xiros Cooper has set the table for Captain Panos Akritas and his... more
A famous chef is stabbed to death in his own kitchen. Could an argument over how to bake stuffed tomatoes lead to murder? This is Greece, so anything is possible. John Xiros Cooper has set the table for Captain Panos Akritas and his partner Lieutenant Valia Sternatia to catch the perpetrator who’s cooked up this mystery. The youngest of the chef’s three daughters is accused of carving up her Michelin-starred father. She insists she’s innocent. But the evidence points to her guilt. Xiros Cooper has served up a spicy recipe of simmering excitement. The story has many twists and turns, memorable characters, several more corpses, and a gangster with the head that resembles a lizard. There’s also a love story that turns sour. The surprising finale, when the wrongdoers get their just desserts, completes this feast of a tale! Kalí órexi!
Now available as ebook and paperback
Now available as ebook and paperback
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A dead body, a beautiful librarian, an Albanian assassin, and an ancient letter lost for two thousand years, all threaten the stability of Christendom. More murders follow. Captain Panos Akritas finds himself pulled into a case that could... more
A dead body, a beautiful librarian, an Albanian assassin, and an ancient letter lost for two thousand years, all threaten the stability of Christendom. More murders follow. Captain Panos Akritas finds himself pulled into a case that could shake the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant churches to the core. The hunt for the lost letter exposes Akritas and his partner to dangers they’ve never faced before.The investigation is hindered by the machinations of church officials, politicians, and even his superiors in the Hellenic Police who do not want the lost letter to be made public. Danger lurks everywhere as Akritas doggedly pursues the truth. A compelling narrative, sharply drawn characters, and a careful evocation of the Greek background make Pillar of Faith a novel that will remain in your memory well after you’ve finished reading it.
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Why would anyone want to kill some old men? Six have been murdered already when Police Captain Panos Akritas is put on the case. At first it seems the straightforward business of theft. The old men were rich and defenceless. Easy... more
Why would anyone want to kill some old men? Six have been murdered already when Police Captain Panos Akritas is put on the case. At first it seems the straightforward business of theft. The old men were rich and defenceless. Easy pickings, it seems. But there are small anomalies that baffle Akritas and as he investigates they begin to multiply. The case grows more complicated and disturbing. He becomes a target of the killers and from that point on the case threatens to spin out of control. The investigation takes him into a dark underworld of vengeance, greed, and violence. As the bodies pile up, Akritas realizes that the case has its roots in the darkest episodes of modern Greek history, going back over sixty years to civil war and dictatorship. Against a background of economic and political crisis, the sunny, friendly Greece that tourists love to visit has another side, sinister and deadly. The story takes the reader on a thrilling ride through a modern Athens that tourists never see. With a compelling plot, a careful eye for detail, and unforgettable characters Death in Athens adds a new voice to the Mediterranean noir of that Andrea Camilleri, Manuel Montalban, Michael Dibden, Donna Leon, and Maurizio De Giovanni have made popular.
John Xiros Cooper was born in Athens, Greece. He turned to fiction writing after thirty-five years as a university professor of literature in Canada. The Panos Akritas series adds a new voice to the tradition of Mediterranean noir.
John Xiros Cooper was born in Athens, Greece. He turned to fiction writing after thirty-five years as a university professor of literature in Canada. The Panos Akritas series adds a new voice to the tradition of Mediterranean noir.
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What benefits are there in studying the liberal arts or humanities? In an age of technology, commerce, and materialism, the liberal arts often find themselves beleaguered by the dominant idea that all education should constitute a form of... more
What benefits are there in studying the liberal arts or humanities? In an age of technology, commerce, and materialism, the liberal arts often find themselves beleaguered by the dominant idea that all education should constitute a form of training for the job market, that it be instrumental in making each of us an economic unit in the interests only of wealth accumulation and production. The resulting cultural deficits cannot be quantified, but they are not negligible. This collection of essays, speeches, talks, and other occasional writings begins by trying to answer the question. But there’s more here than the opening piece. The collection encompasses other subjects as well, some public and cultural, and others that are the private experience of the author, including a series of pieces that describe his impressions of returning to the land of his birth after an absence of more than sixty years. John Xiros Cooper spent over thirty-five years as a university professor of English literature. He is a scholar, teacher, and writer and this collection of mainly unpublished works supplement his published scholarship in books, articles, and chapters. Personal reflection, public utterance, and open engagement with the issues of this world make this a collection that will make you think. Some of the pieces may also touch your heart.
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Recent criticism of Eliot has ignored the public dimension of his life and work. His poetry is often seen as the private record of an internal spiritual struggle. Professor Cooper shows how Eliot delib-erately addressed a North Atlantic... more
Recent criticism of Eliot has ignored the public dimension of his life and work. His poetry is often seen as the private record of an internal spiritual struggle. Professor Cooper shows how Eliot delib-erately addressed a North Atlantic 'mandarinate' fearful of social disintegration ...
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Chapter 1 Life Early life, 18881914 1 A bohemian life, 19151922 5 Man of letters, 19231945 12 The sage, 19451965 19 Early life, 18881914 At East Coker in the English county of Somerset, St. Michael's parish... more
Chapter 1 Life Early life, 18881914 1 A bohemian life, 19151922 5 Man of letters, 19231945 12 The sage, 19451965 19 Early life, 18881914 At East Coker in the English county of Somerset, St. Michael's parish church, situated on gently rising ground, looks out over a ...
... AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS IN THE WORKS OF ARNOLD SCHOEN BERG edited by Charlotte M. Cross and Russell Berman VIRGINIA WOOLF IN ... 6 Eliot's Impossible Music 111 Brad Bucknell 1 Eliot's Ars Musica Poetica: Sources in... more
... AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS IN THE WORKS OF ARNOLD SCHOEN BERG edited by Charlotte M. Cross and Russell Berman VIRGINIA WOOLF IN ... 6 Eliot's Impossible Music 111 Brad Bucknell 1 Eliot's Ars Musica Poetica: Sources in French Symbolism 129 John Adames PART III ...
This study examines 'tone' and 'voice' in TS Eliot's early poetry and prose from sociological and historical perspectives. A procedural framework is proposed drawn from recent work in the sociology of knowledge,... more
This study examines 'tone' and 'voice' in TS Eliot's early poetry and prose from sociological and historical perspectives. A procedural framework is proposed drawn from recent work in the sociology of knowledge, social anthropology, and the sociology of language which helps to ...
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Originally published in Ampersand 6 (2001).
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This chapter provides a bridge between ‘the great tradition’ of Victorian realism and the new impulses in fiction of the early twentieth century. In this respect The Secret Agent is a highly paradoxical work. In form and structure it owes... more
This chapter provides a bridge between ‘the great tradition’ of Victorian realism and the new impulses in fiction of the early twentieth century. In this respect The Secret Agent is a highly paradoxical work. In form and structure it owes a debt to the traditions of narrative realism and expressive symbolism in the nineteenth century, traditions which arose in a more settled moral climate than the rather different ethical weather of modernity. Conrad’s caustically ironic vision of contemporary history is entirely a product of twentieth century uncertainty about moral absolutes. This sense of the relativity and ungroundedness of moral values raises important issues that begin to alter the realist tradition.
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Chapter 3 continues with the focus on ‘modernism’ but from a different perspective from Joyce. Art, aestheticism, the cultural role of the artist, and the inter-relationship among the arts in modernism provide the wider critical framework... more
Chapter 3 continues with the focus on ‘modernism’ but from a different perspective from Joyce. Art, aestheticism, the cultural role of the artist, and the inter-relationship among the arts in modernism provide the wider critical framework for our reading of Wyndham Lewis’s satiric novel Tarr (1918, 1928). In contrast to Joyce’s affirmative interiority, Lewis, along with other modernist writers and painters, aggressively champions the external and the objective, providing us with an opportunity to complicate our notion of modernism by identifying a second current within the modernist stream. Lewis’s painterly concentration on the objective and the external has important implications not only for the novel’s form, but for the particular inflections of its language. Lewis’s comic point of view allows us to investigate the place of satire and the satiric spirit in modernity.
Chapter 4 directs our attention to a third current in modernism.
D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921) attempts to reconcile the clash of the inward and the external, that is, the contrasting currents of early modernism. It engages, like T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), the notion of mythopoeic consciousness as the mediating epistemology of the modern. The transgressive potential of mythic thought is fully exploited by Lawrence in his treatment of identity and character, of individual and community, of the personal politics of domination and submission. The novel will also be considered as an attempt to reconcile the experimentalism of Joyce and Lewis and the traditional realism inherited from the great Victorians, chiefly the fiction of Thomas Hardy. The matter of the relationship among the arts, especially the relationship between literature and the visual arts, and literature and music will also be considered.
Chapter 4 directs our attention to a third current in modernism.
D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921) attempts to reconcile the clash of the inward and the external, that is, the contrasting currents of early modernism. It engages, like T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), the notion of mythopoeic consciousness as the mediating epistemology of the modern. The transgressive potential of mythic thought is fully exploited by Lawrence in his treatment of identity and character, of individual and community, of the personal politics of domination and submission. The novel will also be considered as an attempt to reconcile the experimentalism of Joyce and Lewis and the traditional realism inherited from the great Victorians, chiefly the fiction of Thomas Hardy. The matter of the relationship among the arts, especially the relationship between literature and the visual arts, and literature and music will also be considered.
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The study of E. M. Forster’s Passage to India (1924) gives us the opportunity to contrast the modernist ideas we have been pursuing up to this point with a work that represents a larger measure of continuity with the past. Forster’s novel... more
The study of E. M. Forster’s Passage to India (1924) gives us the opportunity to contrast the modernist ideas we have been pursuing up to this point with a work that represents a larger measure of continuity with the past. Forster’s novel typifies a formal conservatism that seems at odds with the prevailing appetite for novelty and innovation in the mid-1920s. Although the novel tackles important themes of modernity, its adaptation of traditional narrative approaches and the expressive style of the late nineteenth century, reminds us of the persistence of the past and it anticipates the revival of realism in the work of Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen (among others) in the 1930s and 1940s after the dissolution of the first phase of twentieth century modernism. The novel also quietly returns us to the ethical world of the Victorian moralists in its liberal critique of the British imperial presence in India.
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This chapter completes our reading of the modernist revolution by examining one of the most accomplished examples of modernist art in the late 1920s, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). All aspects of traditional narrative are... more
This chapter completes our reading of the modernist revolution by examining one of the most accomplished examples of modernist art in the late 1920s, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). All aspects of traditional narrative are sharply interrogated by Woolf, especially the matter of point-of-view and the daring handling of a character’s inner world by her masterful use of ‘stream-of- consciousness’. Again the relationship among the arts, in this case literature and the visual arts, is pursued a little further. In this novel too, philosophical issues, especially the increasingly troublesome problem of the relation of language to the real and of the ontologies of identity, including the gendering of identity, are brought significantly into view as central themes of the work.
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Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock typifies well a new mood in the fiction of the 1930s after the renovatory spirit of modernism has started to decline. The mood of the 1930s darkens as economic depression and the threat of a new war create a... more
Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock typifies well a new mood in the fiction of the 1930s after the renovatory spirit of modernism has started to decline. The mood of the 1930s darkens as economic depression and the threat of a new war create a situation in which people feel increasingly despairing, unsentimental, abstemious, and morally supine. Greene’s novel also gives us a chance to delineate the character of a resurgence of realism in fiction. Although Brighton Rock looks back, to some extent, to the supplanted realism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is not entirely free of the influence of the modernists.
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The appetite for a new realism in content and form also marks our final work, Elizabeth Bowen’s powerful novel of wartime London, The Heat of the Day. This is a forceful novel in terms of verbal style, theme, characterization and... more
The appetite for a new realism in content and form also marks our final work, Elizabeth Bowen’s powerful novel of wartime London, The Heat of the Day. This is a forceful novel in terms of verbal style, theme, characterization and narrative cogency. And it takes particular note of the experience of women in patriarchal society, especially the way women often find themselves as part of men’s stories, and rarely the originators of their own life-narratives. The novel conveys the lonely desolation of a mature woman wounded by the treacherous compromises forced on her by the world. It dissects with surgical precision the blindness of desire, exploring intimacy and the conflicts between private lives and public masks.
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Abstract One of the effects of literary modernism was to obscure the boundaries among the traditional genres and sub-genres. The clearest such inherited distinction was the difference between poetry and prose. With poetry as the... more
Abstract
One of the effects of literary modernism was to obscure the boundaries among the traditional genres and sub-genres. The clearest such inherited distinction was the difference between poetry and prose. With poetry as the leading edge of the modernist revolution, prose fiction and specifically the novel were not immune from the innovations of poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D. and others. Four influences stand out. The new importance given to the Image in modernist poetry. The development of stream of consciousness as a mode in fiction, and the lyricism that results, is another. A third influence comes from the emphasis on sound and voice in poetry. Finally, the use of collage in the work of Eliot and Pound as a new approach to form also affects the novel. This fourth development coincides with the rise of film and the editing process known as montage.
One of the effects of literary modernism was to obscure the boundaries among the traditional genres and sub-genres. The clearest such inherited distinction was the difference between poetry and prose. With poetry as the leading edge of the modernist revolution, prose fiction and specifically the novel were not immune from the innovations of poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D. and others. Four influences stand out. The new importance given to the Image in modernist poetry. The development of stream of consciousness as a mode in fiction, and the lyricism that results, is another. A third influence comes from the emphasis on sound and voice in poetry. Finally, the use of collage in the work of Eliot and Pound as a new approach to form also affects the novel. This fourth development coincides with the rise of film and the editing process known as montage.
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My title comes from a question I heard in my last year of full-time teaching after I mentioned, in a lecture, the name of a famous French thinker.
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The paper discusses the nature of personal dictatorships and oligarchies and their relationship to democracy.
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PowerPoint slides for lectures on Vorticism in London 1914-1915.
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PowerPoint slides for a lectures on Mina Loy
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PowerPoint slides for a lecture on the image in modernism focussing on Ezra Pound and H.D.
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Senior undergraduate course, British drama from Wilde to Beckett
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Senior undergraduate course
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Senior undergraduate course
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Introductory course for second year students
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This talk was given to the Pharos Society of Vancouver on 25 May 2009. The Society brings together people interested in ancient and modern Greek history and culture.
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These are the slides that accompany the lecture, Two Byrons, One Greece.