Courses (2025-26)
Literature and Critical Theory courses for the 2025-26 academic year. Please note: course listings change from year to year. Should you have any questions, please contact vic.academics@utoronto.ca.
LCT202Y1Y | Forms of Representation
LCT202Y1Y
Forms of Representation
Professor Jessica Copley
M 11-1
In this class students will explore the problem of representation across cultural boundaries. We will consider works from the western tradition and beyond, investigating how imaginative texts foster reflection on ourselves and our world. We will pay particular attention to the questions of what “form” is, and what “representation” is. In other words, we will investigate the ways that meaning is produced and understood by members of a culture, and we will examine the special roles that art can play in society and in politics.Topics for critical reflection include: genre, narrative, aesthetics, history, the self and the other, sexuality, and ecology. The texts we'll read might include Homer’s The Odyssey, excerpts from the Bible and the Koran, Aristotle’s Poetics, Sappho's poetry, Dante’s Inferno, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps, portions of Auerbach’s Figura, and Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Course activities may include a visit to the E.J. Pratt Library’s Special Collections, and/or sessions with invited scholars and writers. Assessment will be based on committed participation during tutorial and lecture, presentations, and a sequence of written assignments.
Exclusion: VIC202Y1
Breadth Requirement: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)
LCT203H1F | Empires I
LCT203H1F
Empires I
Professor Mary Nyquist
T 11-1
LCT204H1S/ REN241H1S | Canons and Canonicity
LCT204H1S/REN241H1S
Canons and Canonicity
Professor Paul Stevens
T 1-2, R 1-3
The focus of this course is Paradise Lost. We discuss Milton’s “imperial epic” in a number of interrelated contexts: for instance, Adam and Eve, romance and gender relations; Satan, power, and nation formation; God, justice and the meaning of grace. All these issues are immediately relevant to the way we live now, from popular music to contemporary politics. Most importantly, we discuss the poem both in relation to the inherited “canon” of Scripture and the emerging “canon” of English literature. What are canons and to what extent did English literature become a “secular scripture”? This allows us to examine Milton’s influence in such very recent works of literature as Cormac McCarthy’s demonic epic Blood Meridian.
Breadth Requirement: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
LCT205H1S | Empires II
LCT205H1S
Empires II
Professor Conrad James
T 11-1
LCT301H1F | Seminar in Critical Writing
LCT301H1F
Seminar in Critical Writing
Professor Lee Emrich
R 11-1
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.
Breadth Requirement: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
LCT302H1S | Pasts and Futures
LCT302H1S
Pasts and Futures
Professor Shaun Ross
F 11-1
LCT305H1F/ EDS369H1F | Institutions and Power
Professor Shaun Ross
This course will feature dissident memoirs from the period of late socialism in the Soviet Union to consider institutions and critical theory from a new angle. The focus on dissident memoirs will allow us to interrogate genre and the relationship of literature to history. The memoir form offers a special site for examining the writing of the self in relation to institutions both official (e.g. the Communist Party and ideology; Soviet publishing, censorship and Socialist Realism; the KGB; the courts and prisons) and unofficial (grassroots social networks; dissident self-publishing).
We will discuss Michel Foucault’s theory of the construction of the self by institutions and ask: what does this illuminate about the Soviet case and what aspects does it obscure? The surveillance from above noted by Foucault is important, but so are the networks of peers created by Soviet people to support more independent realization of values for a just society. Scholars of the Soviet period and dissident memoirists themselves describe variable relationships to many institutions including the literary tradition (official and non-official); political thought (not limited to official Marxism-Leninism), human rights discourse; the structure of domestic and professional life, including the gendered self and intimate relationships; and national culture.
Readings and discussion will encourage careful attention to specific contexts and voices and foster the kind of meta-theoretical perspective needed for comparative critical theory. A series of assignments incorporating personal free-writes and creative options will help students build on established tools for close textual scrutiny to consider how various forms of writing and communication afford self-expression in variable relations to institutions and power in their own and other contexts.Primary readings from rights activists, women, and national movement activists may include Ludmila Alexeyeva, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner, Eduard Kuznetsov and Myroslav Marynovych. Theoretical and historical analysis from Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jochen Hellbeck, Irina Paperno, and others.
LCT306H1S | Culture and Media
LCT306H1S
Culture and Media
Professor Sherry Lee
R 11-2
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.
LCT308H1S | Identities
LCT308H1S
Identities
Professor Andreas Motsch
W 11-1
Though “identity” might suggest sameness, it is historically unstable and has many components, including ability/disability, age, class, ethnicity, gender, health/illness, ‘race,’ sexuality, and religion. This course considers the complexities of identity-formation and identity-transformation as captured in literary texts and cultural artefacts over a wide range of historical and cultural contexts.
Recommended Preparation: LCT202Y1
Exclusion: VIC308H1
Breadth Requirements: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)
LCT349H1F | Special Topics
LCT349H1F
Special Topics
Professor: TBA
F 11-1
LCT402H1S | Translation and Comparativity
LCT402H1S
Translation and Comparativity
Professor Eric Cazdyn
W 1-3
This course will consider questions of adaptation, appropriation, imitation, hybridity and incommensurability across languages, geographical regions, epochs, media, and academic disciplines. Course topics may include the role of translation in the historical projects of nation-building and empire.
Prerequisite: LCT202Y1 and one of: LCT302H1, LCT303H1, LCT304H1, LCT305H1, LCT306H1, LCT307H1; or permission of instructor.
Exclusion: VIC402H1
Breadth Requirements: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)
LCT403H1S | Advanced Topics in Literature and Critical Theory: Romantic Scotland, Global Mobility, and Colonial Entanglement
LCT403H1S
Advanced Topics in Literature and Critical Theory: Romantic Scotland, Global Mobility, and Colonial Entanglement
Professor Angela Esterhammer
F 1-3
This course will explore the innovative and influential literary works produced by Scottish writers during the Romantic era – a period of increasing global mobility that was shaped by emigration, colonization, and a variety of intercultural relationships. Spurred by James Watt’s development of an improved steam engine in 1776, Scots played a key role in the industrial revolution, the development of transport and communication, and the expansion of the British empire throughout the early nineteenth century. We’ll examine how the industry and commerce of Glasgow, the intellectual ferment of Edinburgh, and the mythology of the Highlands combined to produce bestselling works that had a transformative impact on readers in Britain and far beyond. Scottish Romantic fiction, poetry, theatre, and song engaged with settler-Indigenous relations in North America; slavery and abolition in the Caribbean and Central America; perceptions of the Muslim world; adventure in the South Seas. We’ll invoke contemporary critical approaches to open up fascinating perspectives on Robert Burns, Joanna Baillie, Walter Scott, James Hogg, Mary Brunton, John Galt, Lord Byron, and other writers in an era of global power relationships and cross-cultural encounters.
Prerequisite: LCT202Y1 and one of: LCT302H1, LCT303H1, LCT304H1, LCT305H1, LCT306H1, LCT307H1, LCT308H1. Students who do not meet the prerequisites should contact the department.
LCT401H1 Fall Courses | Cross-listed from Comparative Literature
LCT401 courses offer you the opportunity to take part in a graduate seminar in Comparative Literature. The courses listed below are all 'Special Topics' courses for the fall term, and may differ from year to year.
Please note: you may only take one LCT401 course (i.e 0.5 credit).
To apply: please email vic.academics@utoronto.ca with the name of the 401 course section you'd like to apply to (e.g. LCT401 - Literature, Trauma, Modernity) by August 1, 2024.
LCT401H1 Spring Courses | Cross-listed from Comparative Literature
LCT401 courses offer you the opportunity to take part in a graduate seminar in Comparative Literature. The courses listed below are all 'Special Topics' courses for the fall term, and may differ from year to year.
Please note: you may only take one LCT401 course (i.e 0.5 credit).
To apply: please email vic.academics@utoronto.ca with the name of the 401 course section you'd like to apply to (e.g. LCT401 - Literature, Trauma, Modernity) by August 25, 2024.