Literature and Critical Theory Courses

LCT202Y1Y
Forms of Representation
Professor TBC
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
Professor Mary Nyquist
T 11-1

LCT204H1S/REN241H1S
Canons and Canonicity 
Professor Paul Stevens
T 1-2, R 1-3 

LCT205H1S
Empires II
Professor Conrad James
T 11-1

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.

LCT302H1S
Pasts and Futures
Professor Shaun Ross
F 11-1

In 2024, after nearly 15 years of deliberation, the International Commission on Stratigraphy formally voted against officially recognizing the “Anthropocene” as a new geological epoch.  Nevertheless, the anthropogenic environmental crises that first prompted the creation of this term have only become more acute, demanding not only a radical re-conception of the relationship between human and geological history, but a reconsideration of the ways human culture, including literature, shape and respond to the non-human world. This course will introduce students to ecocriticism, a network of related approaches within literary studies explicitly concerned with the issues of the anthropocene. Ecocriticism analyzes literary representations of human beings’ relationship to their environment, seeking not only to understand the histories and ideologies that have produced our current ecological crises, but to discover within literature and criticism tools for responding positively to them.

This course will be particularly interested in the different ways  “nature” has been conceived: as an idealized but lost pastoral past, as an apocalyptic force of renewal, as a perpetual system of harmonious balance, and so on. We will organize our attention to this theme in relation to three periods or traditions of “nature” poetry—Romantic, Renaissance, and contemporary(ish) Canadian. This division will also allow us to consider how ecocriticism may shape future understandings of literary periodization.

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

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.

LCT307H1S
Periodization and Cultural History
Professor Molly Bronstein
F 11-1

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 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)

LCT402H1S
Translation and Comparativity
Professor Eric Cazdyn
W 1-3

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

Section L0101: Politics and Poetic Form
Professor Mary Nyquist
T 1-3

Of the three large literary genres (epic, drama, lyric), lyric poetry tends to be the least studied; it also often triggers anxiety. In this course, students will learn to identify a variety of lyric poetry’s sub-genres and formal features. We will explore questions such as, what are some of the ways in which historical and political contexts matter? How do poetry’s rhythmical and musical elements manifest themselves, if at all? What social positions or ideological formations are associated with specific sub-genres or forms? In what ways have poets from marginalized communities eschewed or appropriated conventional sub-genres or poetic forms? How have new forms of media contributed to debates about “formalist” and “anti-formalist” positions? To make this manageable, we will focus on (1) early modern and contemporary poetry (2) pastoral poetry, the sonnet, and elegy (3) Euro-colonial and post-colonial contexts. Students will be selecting many of the poems to be studied in class; if they were written in languages other than English, they will be accompanied by translations. 

CrossList Course: COL5153HF

Section L0201: Fueling Inequity: Energy, Extractivism, Environmental Futures
Professor Eva-Lynn Jagoe
W 11-1

This course engages in critical work in the areas of energy humanities, energy history, and energy politics, in order to investigate the potential for energy democracy and a just future. We begin with definitions of energy as both a concept and historical phenomenon, examining its mobilization as “power. Next, we interrogate the political and cultural ideologies associated with extractivism and its implications for social and environmental justice. This leads us to analyze competing visions of energy transition and renewable futures. Through interdisciplinary readings in theory, history, literature, and politics, we will scrutinize how these discussions shape our understanding of democracy in the 21st century. 

CrossList Course: COL5155HF

Section L0301: The Bases for Comparison
Professor Eric Cazdyn
W 1-3

COL1000H is a general introduction to comparative literature, and to contemporary theory and criticism. Its purpose is to offer all incoming M.A. and Ph.D. students exposure to key issues in the discipline. Organized around the broad theme of “Bases for Comparison,” each of our meetings will explore a particular issue or problem addressed in contemporary scholarship. After briefly reviewing the history of the discipline, we will interrogate a number of the categories foundational to it: language, literature, aesthetics, theory, humanity/humanities, relation, and comparison. We will conclude by reading some exemplary new work in comparative literature, through which we will chart possible directions for our own scholarship, and new challenges for the field. 

CrossList Course: COL1000HF

Section L0401: Queer Ethics and Aesthetics
Professor John Ricco
R  10-12

This course examines recent work in Queer Theory, Philosophy, Literature, and Visual Culture, in which questions of ethics and aesthetics are of principal concern in thinking about friendship; sexual pleasure; intimacy; decision; anonymity and identity; social encounters and relations. We will read works by: Leo Bersani, Tom Roach, Tim Dean, William Haver, Michel Foucault, Herve Guibert, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lauren Berlant, and others. 

CrossList Course: COL5127HF

Section L0501: Benjamin's Arcades Project
Professor Rebecca Comay
R - 1-3

This course will be devoted to a close reading of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s unfinished and posthumously published montage of fragments, quotations and aphorisms on the urban culture of Second Empire Paris – “capital of the nineteenth century. ” The birthplace of consumer capitalism and the site of numerous failed revolutions and counterrevolutionary innovations, nineteenth century Paris crystallized, for Benjamin – writing in exile from fascist Germany — the multiple ambiguities of modernity itself. Many of these ambiguities were registered in disorienting new experiences of space and time. While exploring Benjamin’s reading of the various strands of visual, literary and architectural culture, we will consider the implications of his approach for thinking about history, memory, and politics today. Our reading of the Arcades will be supplemented with readings from Baudelaire, Blanqui, Fourier, Marx, Adorno, Brecht, Aragon, Simmel, and Freud as well as contemporary critical theorists. 

CrossList Course: COL5081HF

Section L0601: Classics and Theory Seminar: The Rhetoric of Empire
Professor Eric Gunderson
W 3-5

Roman imperialism unfolded over several centuries. It was a basic, albeit complex, element of life in the ancient Mediterranean. It affected, directly or indirectly, just about everyone of every gender, class, and ethnicity, and often differentially so. Accordingly the question is both too important to ignore but also too large to admit of any comprehensive summary. 

CrossList Course: JCO5121HF

Section 0101: The Gift - Le don
Professor Andreas Motsch
T 9-11

Marcel Mauss’ now “classic” essay on gift exchange inspired many debates in sociology, literature, critical theory, philosophy, anthropology and beyond. Theorizing the gift as a social and symbolic practice, as a fundamental way of establishing social relationships, Mauss’ essay allows us to rethink what constitutes an object, what is implied in the exchange of objects (and words), what is the role of such exchanges, and which kind of exchange speaks to what kind of social relationship and type of society. What is a gift, a commodity, a work of art, a fetish, a money transaction? How does the gift move from “primitive” to “modern” societies? Which socioeconomic models privilege gift exchange? What is the role of the gift in oral societies? Can speech be theorized as a gift and what does it mean “to give your word” to someone? What does it mean “to give life”? 

CrossList Course: JFC5120H

Section L0201: Performative Biographical Acts: Painted and Photographic Representations of Self
Professor Julie LeBlanc
T 11-1

In the autobiographical and historiographic narratives chosen to explore the various ways in which text and image can interact with and reflect on each other, the writers use a highly metalinguistic discourse to discuss the problems of self-referentiality in language and in images in order to reflect on the use of images, paintings and sketches in their visualizations and articulations of selfhood. Edward Ardizzone, Annie Ernaux, Frida Kahlo and Jacques Poulin, all express an awareness of the auto-bio-graphical self as decentered, multiple, fragmented and divided against itself in the act of observing and being. The use of paintings, drawings, figures of ekphrasis and photos (portraits and self-portraits), operate as visual supplements (illustrations) and corroboration (verification) of the autobiographical subjects and their narratives. 

CrossList Course: JFC5129HS

Section L0301: Critical Theory: The French-German Connection
Professor Willi Goetschel
T 3-5

This course examines central theoretical issues in contemporary thought with particular attention to the role that the “Frankfurt School” and its affiliates such as Benjamin, Kracauer, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas and others play in the context of modern German social and cultural thought. In France, thinkers like Foucault, and Derrida respond to this tradition and enrich it. The course explores in which way the continuing dialogue between these thinkers informs current critical approaches to rethinking issues and concerns such as theorizing modernity, culture, secularization, multiculturalism, and the vital role of cultural difference. 

CrossList Course: JGC1855H

Section L0401: Text and Digital Media
Professor Ruoyun Bai
W 10-12

This course examines new forms of textualities and textual practices that are emerging in the digital era. It highlights an understudied dimension of the text, i.e. the medium that forms its material and technological infrastructure such as scroll, codex, book, CD, e-book, the Internet, and smartphone. The course starts with a historical investigation into the printed text and print culture. Then it moves on to the question of how digital technologies shape reading and writing as well as other text-based cultural practices. While the course revolves around the mediality of the text, it distances itself from technological determinism by stressing the facts that digital technologies are always embedded in and shaped by historically specific political, social, and cultural conditions. This course is designed for students who are interested in questions and issues related to literary production in the digital era and more generally the materiality of the text. Theoretical and scholarly works we will engage with in this course include, but not limited to, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man (McLuhan, 1964), The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Adrian Johns, 2000), Writing Machines (N. Katherine Hayles, 2002), Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print (Jay David Bolter, 2001), Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (Mark Hansen, 2006), The Interface Effect (Alexander R. Galloway), The Language of New Media (Lev Manovich, 2002), Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 2009). 

CrossList Course: COL5122HS

Section L0501: Revolutionary Women's Cultures in East Asia
Professor Anup Grewal
W 12-2

This course examines the interrelationship of concepts and practices of what we may term “revolutionary womanhood” and “revolutionary culture” (in the spheres of literature, cinema, arts, mass print media, and cultural associations and institutions) in different modern national, anti-imperialist, and socialist movements of the early to mid 20th c across East Asia. “Revolution” and “woman” were key terms, representing “new” subjectivities, collectivities, and arenas for imagining/enacting the transformation of the political, social and cultural realms in China, Japan and Korea.  When brought together under different frameworks of “revolutionary womanhood” what new possibilities emerged for these imagined and real transformations? We will explore the expressions and meanings of “revolutionary womanhood” in different cultural genres and media, examine the historical contexts of each revolutionary moment/movement, and engage with scholarship on the intersections between ideas and practices of revolution, culture, and gender. While attentive to particular local contexts, we will also explore the intra-regional circulation of concepts of “revolution”, “culture” and “woman” and their changing meanings across the period in East Asia. We will also engage in further comparative analysis with other revolutionary cultures transnationally, including but not limited to pre and post 1917 Russia, Europe and the U.S., with which ideas and practices of “revolution” and “new womanhood” in East Asia had deep practical and imagined connections. In this sense, we will explore the transnational (or internationalist) dimensions and visions of revolutionary women’s cultures in East Asia. 

CrossList Course: JHL1680HS

Section 0601: Sports Narrated
Professor Atsuko Sakai
R 10-12

This course explores sports as participatory and spectatorial events in terms of: translation between physical and textual practices; the temporality, spatiality, and agency in the acts of playing and watching of sports; the body, tools, and environment in sport activities; the sporting events and local/global communities; sports for the promotion of ideologies; sports in bildungsroman; homosociality and gender bending; the sports media and fan culture; and the relationship between the grammar of the narrative and the rules of the game in various sports. We read theories (Adorno, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Caillois, Conner, Eco, Gumbrecht, Sartre, Serres, Young) as well as theoretically informed critical works in mobility studies, disability studies, environmental studies, space studies, studies of affordance and prostheses, phenomenology, rhythmanalysis, sound studies, gender studies, and studies of the empire and colonialism. The sessions are thematically arranged and aligned with literary and cinematic sources on sports, by various authors (e.g., Beckett, Bolaño, Cole, Coover, Groff, Hornby, Ishikawa, Murakami, Natsume, O’Brien, Sillitoe, Twain, Vargas Llosa, Vladislavic, Wallace, Wells) and directors (e.g., Chandha, Eastwood, Gordon and Parreno, Hudson, Marshall, Yates). 

CrossList Course: COL5126HS

Section L0701: Dramaturgies of the Dialectic
Professor Rebecca Comay
Thurs 1-3

This seminar will explore the constellation of dialectics, theatre, and politics in (and in the wake of) Hegel.  We’ll be thinking about some repercussions of Hegel’s infamous pronouncement of the “end of art.”   Why does Hegel say that art “no longer counts” as the expression of truth, and what does this imply for the practice of philosophy and for political practice?  We’ll look at the ways in which art stages (literally) its own undoing in theatre and the peculiar afterlife of theatre in philosophy as a scene of pedagogy, a performance, and a political spectacle. The first part of the course will focus on selected portions of Hegel’s Aesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit.  We’ll then consider Marx’s deployment of the Hegelian dialectic in the Eighteenth Brumaire as he searches (in vain?) for a new revolutionary subject amidst the “farce” of the post-1848 counterrevolution.  Finally, we’ll consider some surprising reverberations in Beckett’s Endgame.  While the main authors will be Hegel, Marx, and Beckett, we’ll also have occasion to think about other writers (including C.L.R. James, Adorno, Benjamin, Badiou, Karatani,). 

CrossList Course: COL5138HS