Literature and Critical Theory Courses

LCT202Y1Y
Forms of Representation
Professor Ann Komaromi (Fall)/Professor Sarah Dowling (Winter)

Exclusion: VIC202Y1
Breadth Requirement: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)

LCT203H1F
Empires I
Professor Shaun Ross

LCT204H1S/REN241H1S
Canons and Canonicity 
Professor Paul Stevens

LCT205H1S
Empires II
Professor Conrad James

LCT301H1F
Seminar in Critical Writing
Professor Lee Emrich

This course is a writing intensive class devoted to the practice and analysis of critical writing. We will explore the critical tradition, the public(s) for whom one writes, and the choice of voice, point of view, and writerly form. The class will be structured around workshop style discussion and writing exercises.

LCT302H1S
Pasts and Futures
Professor Ann Komaromi

An introduction to representations of history, in which we will consider concepts that turn on the problem of time such as tradition, periodization, genealogy, memory, crisis, revolution, eschatology, and utopia.

Exclusion: VIC302H1
Recommended Preparation: LCT202Y1
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)

LCT306H1F
Culture and Media
Professor Sherry Lee

This year’s theme is: Image, Sound, Text in Print Culture (Mass Reproduction) In this course we consider how visual, aural, and textual media within the regime of print culture (preceded by manuscript culture, followed by digital culture) have had formative effects on the production, distribution, and reception of art works, through reading theoretical and literary works. Questions to be asked include: How do human bodies and natural and social environs interact with mechanical reproduction? How do artists operate through their opportunities and mediums provided by the system? How do viewers, listeners, and readers have access to and process works of art in or as reproduction (e.g., photography as a medium or an art form in itself)? How do the flux of non-art stimuli (e.g., sound of nature, noise) complicate the boundaries between nature and culture and between the everyday and art? How has manuscript culture persisted and infiltrated print culture? What potentials for experience (e.g., tactile) have been imagined as impossible/possible and materialized/denied through the analog media? How does the copying of image, sound, and text affect the human sense of temporality (e.g., duration, iterability, memory)? Theorists to be considered may include: Bal, Barthes, Batchen, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Berger, Bourdieu, Burgin, Derrida, Flusser, Grosz, Kittler, Lefebvre, Nancy, Silverman, Sontag, Szendy, Voegelin. Writers of literary sources to be read may include: Abe, Auster, Bernhard, Calvino, Cole, Cortazar, Kafka, Kanai, Ondaatje, Pamuk, Tanizaki, Vladislavic.

LCT307H1F
Periodization and Cultural History
Professor Molly Bronstein

In this class, different periods’ constructions of authorship and authority will provide us with a guide through literary and cultural history. In the Middle Ages “authority” (or auctoritas) is a limited category, tied to Latinity and divine inspiration, and generally restricted to ancient Roman and scriptural authors—until certain key writers cultivate their own vernacular authority (e.g. Chaucer in English, Dante in Italian). Gradually, it becomes possible—if a rare and special accomplishment—for a living writer to become an “author.” This attitude achieves a fraught culmination in the Romantic vision of the author as isolated, inspired, and (often) tortured genius—a model ultimately interrogated and dismantled by 20th-century critics, who sever the text from the cult of the creator’s personality and intentions, elevating the reader’s role and intervention anew. Over the course of the semester, key theoretical and literary texts will reveal different periods’ fluctuating attitudes toward the figure of the author. We’ll engage with scholarship that questions the monolithic nature of authority across period boundaries—revealing the communal and collaborative side of creative production—and reflect on what it means to be an “author” today. Does the old cult of the author have some new usefulness, when machine-generated language threatens it (or seems to)? We’ll bring these literary-historical turning points to bear on new problems posed by the internet and developing technologies, such as LLMs.

LCT308H1S
Identities
Professor Jill Ross

This course will examine medieval and early modern conceptions and constructions of gender, racial and religious identity in a range of literary texts and genres. Using theories of gender, postcolonialism and alterity, the course will bring the premodern into dialogue with the contemporary as a means of engaging with the rich and complex ways that medieval and early modern texts inflect the politics of identity. In addition to providing historical and cultural context for the material to be studied, the course will focus on questions of gender instability, misogyny, transvestism, representations of Jews and Muslims, and racialist thinking evinced in genealogical models. Through a close engagement with medieval romance, epic, bawdy poetry, saints' lives, drama and novel, we will also explore how and why identities of gender, race and religion came to be conflated through a dominant vocabulary and ideology of institutional power. We will also pay special attention to how these identities were able to assert themselves in and through the texts in which they were contained. Texts to be studied include The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, Heldris de Cornuailles's romance Silence, the anonymous Spanish epic The Poem of the Cid, the late medieval English play The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, and the 16th-century Moorish novel, The Abencerraje. 

Recommended Preparation: LCT202Y1
Exclusion: VIC308H1
Breadth Requirements: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)

LCT349H1S
Special Topics in Literature and Critical Theory: Cultural Studies in France - Foucault, Before and After
Professor Andreas Motsch

An introduction to the French tradition of cultural studies through key French thinkers on culture and history, drawing on figures such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. By situating French critical theory within a broader framework of intellectual history and focusing on the emergence of (post)modern subjectivity and cultural production, the course provides students with access to the philosophical and theoretical debates that continue to shape the Humanities today.

The rise of Cultural Studies in North America was influenced by an increasing interest in popular culture, the impact of the British school of Cultural Studies, and the reception of European theory. In addition, postcolonial studies and debates surrounding postmodernity have become central to contemporary approaches to culture, encompassing a wide range of media—including literature, film, and digital culture—as well as socio-political and anthropological studies of communities.

This course focuses particularly on the European—and especially French—contribution to this intellectual paradigm by examining its historical development, cultural context, ideological assumptions, and theoretical foundations.

Students will have the opportunity to work both collaboratively and independently with a wide range of cultural materials.

STS377H1S
Special Topics on Wearable Technology through the Ages
Professor Lee Emrich

This class explores the modern term “wearable technology” as a cultural phenomenon connected to longer histories of embodiment. Course conversations query what is "technology" and how does the concept "wearable" operate as a site of interface with the "human"—but this interface is not socially or politically neutral—it's been debated and manipulated for millenia. The course will provide multiple analytic frames for analyzing wearable technology: media studies, fashion theory, and theories of subjectivity among others, and readings will range from early modern to modern texts and draw on multiple genres and media (news articles, research articles, the Bible, fashion photography, corporate discourse, plays, letters, philosophical treatises). Ultimately, the goal is to explore the theoretical and discursive and material entanglements of wearable technologies, questioning how these garments or accessories tug at the very threads composing our bodies and societies.

Prerequisite: Completion of 9.0 credits
Recommended Preparation: 0.5 credit in Science and Society
Breadth Requirements: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)

LCT402H1S
Translation and Comparativity
Professor Zain R. Mian 

Prerequisite: LCT202Y1 and one of: LCT302H1, LCT303H1, LCT304H1, LCT305H1, LCT306H1, LCT307H1; or permission of instructor.
Exclusion: VIC402H1
Breadth Requirements: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)

Prerequisite: LCT202Y1 and one of: LCT302H1,  LCT303H1,  LCT304H1,  LCT305H1,  LCT306H1,  LCT307H1,  LCT308H1. Students who do not meet the prerequisites should contact the department.

Prerequisite: Completion of 14.0 credits and permission of Program Coordinator.
Exclusion: VIC494H1