Mason Harris

I was born in 1939 and grew up in New England in the U.S. I decided to become an English major early in life. I got my BA from Harvard in 1961 and my Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY-B) in 1971. My dissertation was on the fiction of George Eliot. In 1966 we and our baby daughter immigrated to Canada; we are very glad that we made the decision to come to this welcoming country. We have now been Canadian citizens for over thirty years. We have three children and two lovely granddaughters.

I started teaching in 1966 in the English Department, in the second year of the existence of Simon Fraser University. I continued teaching there until I took mandatory retirement a couple of years age. In academic life, teaching is what I have most enjoyed. I concentrated on literature of the nineteenth century; my main subject has been Victorian fiction. As well, I have always been interested in two genres that start in the nineteenth century and become very popular in the twentieth: science fiction and the detective novel.

I have published articles on George Eliot, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, George Orwell, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, a number of review-articles on various subjects, and a book on the fiction of Joy Kogawa. I have also co-edited a collection of essays from a conference on racism. I have recently completed a scholarly edition of H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, setting this macabre tale in the Darwinian ideas of its time. (The edition will be published in the near future).

I have given a number of talks on CBC radio on science fiction in general and Orwell's critique of language in particular. During the first Gulf War I gave eight interviews on radio and television about what Orwell would have said about the euphemistic language in which the war was being reported. I later published an essay on this subject in an anthology on the war.

I have long enjoyed the literature of crime and detection, and have recently become increasingly interested in it as a literary genre. Earlier in my career I have taught some of the great detective novels and stories of the Victorian period. My forthcoming course for seniors will be my first academic exploration of detective fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

I have been interested in the Seniors Program for some time. As I was approaching retirement I was lucky to be asked to teach a course in Victorian fiction for seniors. This turned out to be one of the most enjoyable courses I have ever taught. What a pleasure to teach students all of whom took the course because they were interested in the subject!

From the enthusiasm generated by my class of senior students, I saw that I might do some of my most interesting teaching after retirement. Soon after retiring, I launched my career in the Seniors program with a course on Gothic literature. Now I look forward to embarking on tales of crime and detection with senior students this coming spring semester.