Dr. Alex Wetmore is an associate professor in the English Department at UFV.
Dr. Wetmore has been working at UFV since 2016, he specializes in 18th century literature and rhetoric. Wetmore spoke with The Cascade about the courses he teaches and why rhetoric is so important.
What inspired you to become a professor?
“About three-quarters of my way through [my degree], I had a professor who was really interesting, and her class was on detective fiction. I worked really hard on an essay, and she mentioned [that I] can actually keep going.
“I hadn’t really thought about it, but I realized, as I was getting towards the end, that I really loved studying, and I didn’t feel like I was done. I decided that I would go to grad school, and I would just keep studying literature.”
What do you like most about literature?
“I think what I like about literature is that you get a chance to raise and explore really big [and] exciting questions about meaning, language, [and] the power of storytelling … I just feel literature is a powerful medium for expressing meaning and for having cultural significance, and there’s no real way to exhaust your curiosity in studying it.”
What courses do you teach?
“Recently, I had a chance to teach three courses that I really enjoy. One is ENGL 319, which is The 18th Century Novel, and we get a chance to explore the origins and history of the novel as a genre … We get to read some early experiments in this genre where the authors don’t really know what they’re doing or what the rules are gonna be, and students find that really interesting.
“I really enjoy teaching ENGL 366, which is Literary Theory, and that’s a course where we get to ask the biggest possible questions that literature can raise around the nature of meaning, the power of language to mediate and shape our experiences of the world. We get to read not just literary works, but also what thinkers, theorists, and literary critics had to say about literature and how it works.
“The third course … which I’m teaching right now, is [ENGL 271C] Rhetoric and Contemporary Humour … In this class, we get to take humour seriously, and students learn a lot of rhetorical terms and concepts that will be valuable to their writing, and whatever kind of communication, writing, and reading, that they do, we do it through the lens of studying humour and comedy, with a particular focus on stand-up comedy.”
Why is it important to understand rhetoric?
“I think rhetoric is really important. [It’s] one of the oldest fields of study, it’s been around before Western philosophy established itself. It has its roots in giving powerful speeches, in persuasive communication, but it’s also the study of what makes language and any form of symbolic communication effective, meaningful, powerful, [and] beautiful … understanding how that works affects our daily lives, it can be useful wherever your education takes you after UFV.”
What current projects are you working on?
“On the research side, I was fortunate to get an Insight Development Grant through SSHRC, which is the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to start to develop a new project, which I think is exciting. This project is in a newer area of literary studies that goes under the umbrella term ‘the digital humanities.’
“With this new project, [entitled] “Tears for Gears,” I’m looking at the relationship between technology and emotion as it shows up in 18th century writing … It was really trendy [then] to be emotionally sensitive [and] to be easily overcome by your feelings … It influenced literature, philosophy, medical science, all kinds of things … people often compared their feelings to machines [and] technological artifacts. They would describe the inner workings of their emotions as clockwork, or a watch.
“For this project, I’m going to use new text analysis tools that you can [use to] study patterns within a whole bunch of works in a digitized archive to try and figure out how references to emotions and technology intersected in this period.”
What do you want to do with this research?
“The project plan is for the research to culminate in a few outputs: a digital humanities online resource where we will share our research findings for other academics and relevant communities, an article to be submitted to a peer-reviewed scholarly journal on our work, a more public-facing essay [that is] ideally co-authored with my research assistants at UFV, and multiple presentations at academic conferences. My longer-term hope is that it may become part of a larger book-length project down the road, and also benefit my research and teaching at UFV in other ways.”
Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Darien Johnsen is a UFV alumni who obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree with double extended minors in Global Development Studies and Sociology in 2020. She started writing for The Cascade in 2018, taking on the role of features editor shortly after. She’s passionate about justice, sustainable development, and education.