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Victoria College
Upper-Year Programs / Literature and Critical Theory / Literature and Critical Theory Courses

Courses (2023-24)

Literature and Critical Theory courses for the 2023-24 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 Sarah Dowling
M 12-2

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, Aristotle’s Poetics, Sappho's poetry, Dante’s Inferno, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps, 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
Distribution Requirement: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)

LCT203H1F | Empires I

LCT203H1F
Empires I
Professor Mary Nyquist
T 10-12

What is colonialism and how is it related to “empires?” Why and how are the European empires that developed in the early modern period so often associated with “race” and racialization? In this course we will explore the early stages of European colonialism and the long-term impact of the transformations it inaugurated. The rise of Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French empires will be studied by readings of a variety of literary texts. We will discuss issues relating to capitalism, colonialism, gender, the rise of racializing discourses, and forms of resistance against oppressive colonial rule.  Students will acquire a strong set of interpretative and writing skills, will learn to situate the literature we discuss in a broad, historical framework, and will be encouraged to think critically about contemporary manifestations of the issues we take up.
Methods of evaluation: two short essays (15 each); one in-class commentary (25%); a final take-home essay (20%); participation (25%)

Exclusion: VIC203H1, VIC203Y1
Distribution Requirement Status: Humanities
Breadth Requirement: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
LCT205H1S | Empires II

LCT205H1S
Empires II
Professor Shaun Ross
T 10-12

This course examines literary representations of intercultural encounters in the context of imperial conquest and hegemony from the emergence of the modern nation-state through more recent developments in globalization. We will consider four novelists (Aphra Behn, Herman Melville, Chinua Achebe, and Shusaku Endo), each writing from a distinct cultural perspective, who represent encounters with the “Other” at different points in the history of imperialist expansion. We will frame our analysis of these literary authors with reference to several key 20th-century philosophical reflections on the relationship between the self and others, attending to the novel’s special power as a medium for encountering and imagining the Other in the context of colonial expansion and globalization.

Exclusion: VIC205H1, VIC203Y1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
LCT249H1F | Renaissance Masterworks and Remixes

LCT249H1F
Special Topics in Literature and Critical Theory
Professor Paul Stevens
T 1-2, R 1-3

Renaissance Masterworks and Remixes

Everyone, from Vladimir Putin to Greta Thunberg, wants to talk about the West, but it’s not clear that many people really understand what the West means. The West is the culture that we, you and I, live in. It has a very specific identity, and its norms shape the everyday way we think and act. If you want to understand the West, if you want to get a handle on its cultural DNA, you need to access its discursive codes. Those codes are contained in two sets of texts called Scripture and the Classics, and if you want to understand the long and complex reach of these texts, especially at the point where the West goes global and begins to turn into what we now call modernity, you need to read Milton’s Paradise Lost. Now, whether you think such a study is a journey to the heart of darkness or to the gates of paradise, it doesn’t really matter, because Milton, like his Archangel Raphael, will show you things you thought “Unimaginable.” And it is in that “unimaginableness,” that inventiveness or creativity, that you’ll catch glimpses of what the future might be.

In other words, Paradise Lost is the single most influential poem in the English language, the language which now serves as the world’s principal means of global communication. On the one hand, the poem is redolent with memories of the Classics and their inspired Renaissance imitations from Dante to Shakespeare, and, on the other, its influence is pervasive in modern Anglophone world literature from Jane Austen and Mary Shelley to Cormac McCarthy and Malcolm X. It offers insight into so many of our current pre-occupations, including nationalism, colonialism, gender fluidity, secular humanism, and the intractable banality of evil.

The course has three principal aims. (1) Its general aim is to introduce students to the literary culture of the West through the fictions of John Milton by means of a concise intertextual study of Paradise Lost and Scripture. (2) Its specific aim is to provide students with a coherent understanding of both Scripture and Milton’s epic attempt to re-imagine and re-write it, that is, to write back to and re-invent divine revelation. (3) Its third or formal aim is to help students develop their skills in close reading and constructing both written and oral arguments.

TEXTS:

John Milton: The Major Works. Ed. Orgel & Goldberg. (Oxford UP)
The New Oxford Annotated Bible (Oxford UP); and / or any copy of the King James (AV) Bible of 1611
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (Oxford UP)



Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
LCT302H1F | Pasts and Futures

LCT302H1F
Pasts and Futures
Professor Eva-Lynn Jagoe
W 10-12

This course explores the pasts and futures of farming and food production in a present of extractive capitalism. We will interrogate the industrial “Green Revolution” of the mid 20th century, which sought to project a future of “feeding the world” that would break with past patterns of subsistence farming and structural poverty. The impacts of Big Agriculture seem to shape our present, eliding other histories and possible futures. We will explore alternative approaches to food production, such as food sovereignty movements, Indigenous foodways, and regenerative agriculture, with a focus on their temporalities—the pasts upon which they draw, and the horizons to which they aspire. To do so, we'll draw from a diverse range of texts, such as essays, novels, films, activist work, and critiques by Queer, Black, and Indigenous theorists of temporality. Ultimately, this course aims to challenge heteronormative, capitalist, and extractive concepts of time through attention to the ever-present question of how we nourish ourselves in a way that doesn’t destroy our future. Along the way, we may wander some campus gardens and nibble on plants!

Recommended Preparation: LCT202Y1
Exclusion: VIC302H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
LCT304H1F | Praxis and Performance

LCT304H1F
Praxis and Performance
Professor Eric Cazdyn
W 1-3

This course will explore what it means to “act” in cultural, political, religious, and psychological realms. We focus on the historically shifting relations between theory and practice, between artifice and agency, and between theatricality and spectatorship.

Recommended Preparation: LCT202Y1
Exclusion: VIC304H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
LCT305H1F | Institutions and Power
LCT305H1F
Institutions and Power
Professor Ann Komaromi
R 1-3

This course analyzes dissidence as critical thinking and resistance to authoritarian institutions and power in various forms. We will focus our attention on dissident memoirs as a practice of writing the self that represents practices of critical resistance. The course will ground the topic in the historical and cultural specificity of Soviet dissident memoirs. We will consider the evolution of the genre of memoirs from the Russian- to the Soviet empire and distinguish camp memoirs from dissident memoirs. We will analyze the narrative structure and style of dissident memoirs written by both famous and lesser-known figures. We will examine dissident writing about defense of human rights, the rights of Soviet citizens, and the rights of national, religious, and other communities. We will consider the relation of dissident writing to institutions of censorship and surveillance in the Soviet state and consider what the history of samizdat, translations and publication abroad tells us about the role of clandestine circulation and international interests in human rights and Cold War politics. These dissident memoirs will be related to the post-totalitarian context of the USSR after Stalin. They will also provide a basis for wider consideration of strategies that challenge power and counter totalitarian impulses manifesting in popular and populist forms and in commercial culture, as well as in institutions linked to strong States. We will discuss dissident memoirs as a complicated model of critical selfhood that remains relevant for resisting State violence, control, and propaganda in the world today. We will also use these memoirs to spark conversations about strategies of resistance to various types of control and efforts to foster fairness and justice in local, community-based, and networked endeavours.
Primary readings from rights activists, women, and national movement activists, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Elena Bonner, Ludmila Alexeyeva, Anatoly Sharansky, Myroslav Marynovych, and others.
Theoretical and historical analysis from Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jochen Hellbeck, Irina Paperno, and others.
Recommended Preparation: LCT202Y1
Exclusion: VIC305H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
LCT306H1S | Culture and Media

LCT306H1S
Culture and Media
Professor Sherry Lee
T 10-12

This class will give us the opportunity to attend specially to elements of our modern media ecology that go unseen, and are thus often forgotten: one is sound, and the understanding of acoustic environments as spaces of cultural enactment; another is time, and the temporality of technological mediations of culture. While keywords such as “media” and “technology” typically attune us most readily to contexts of present-day –– or even future-oriented –– digital images, tools and communications, the historical framework of this course also invites us to consider past technologies as markers of change in the complex relationships between various media, and the cultural moments they both shape and reflect.

Recommended Preparation: LCT202Y1
Exclusion: VIC306H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
LCT307H1S | Periodization and Cultural History

LCT307H1S
Periodization and Cultural History
Professor Shaun Ross
W 10-12

This course explores the phenomenon of secularization as it has shaped various modes of historical periodization. We will consider secularization both as a contested historical narrative and as a stylistic concept, in particular the way narratives of secularization have informed theoretical understandings of the novel. The class will be divided into two main units. We will first examine a number of recent historical and socio-cultural studies of secularism, many of which call into question the once standard narrative that society at large is following an inevitable move away from religious modes of living and thinking. Drawing on these revisionist accounts of secularism, we will reconsider the role and features of the novel as the dominant literary genre of our “secular age.”

Recommended Preparation: LCT202Y1
Exclusion: VIC307H1
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)
LCT308H1F | Identities

LCT308H1F
Identities
Professor Andreas Motsch
R 10-12

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
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)

LCT402H1S | Translation and Comparativity

LCT402H1S
Translation and Comparativity
Professor Willi Goetschel
T 2-4

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
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
Breadth Requirements: Thought, Belief and Behaviour (2)

LCT403H1S | Advanced Topics in Literature and Critical Theory: Ulysses

LCT403H1S
Advanced Topics in Literature and Critical Theory
Ulysses
Professor Ann Komaromi
W 1-3

The Scandal of Ulysses 

We devote the course entirely to reading James Joyce’s novel Ulysses. As we shall see, Joyce’s novel has struck all sorts of authorities as scandalous. We will consider the “scandal” of Ulysses according to government authorities, scholars, editors, and theorists.  Course discussions will explore Joyce’s innovative play with language; his experimental representation of consciousness, subjectivity, and sexuality; his evocation of the Dublin cityscape and colonialism; his use of classical allusions; editions and censorship. We will also talk about the ways in which Joyce’s novel has been understood to exemplify modernist conceptions of subjectivity, history, and art. Why and how might we read Joyce’s provocative novel for today?  

Secondary readings from the 1933 US Court Decision, Richard Ellman, Hugh Kenner, Gyorgy Lukacs, Leo Bersani, Jacques Derrida, and others.  

Prerequisite: LCT202Y1 and one of: LCT302H1, LCT303H1, LCT304H1, LCT305H1, LCT306H1, LCT307H1; or permission of instructor.
Distribution Requirements: Humanities
LCT494 | LCT Senior Research Paper

LCT494
Senior Research Paper

This course provides an opportunity to design an interdisciplinary course of study, not otherwise available within the Faculty, with the intent of addressing specific topics in Literature and Critical Theory. Written application (detailed proposal, reading list and a letter of support from a Victoria College faculty member who is prepared to supervise) must be submitted for approval on behalf of Victoria College. For application procedures visit the Victoria College website. Not eligible for CR/NCR option.

This course is available in two formats, based on the nature of the independent study:
LCT494H1F/S - 0.5 credit, completed in the Fall (F) or Winter (S) semester
LCT494Y1Y - 1 credit, completed over both Fall and Winter semesters of the academic year

To request a Literature and Critical Theory Independent Study, please submit an application by August 1, 2022: courseapps.vicu.utoronto.ca/secure/StudentHome

Your application with consist of the following:
1) Vic Independent Study Form 
Fill out separately and attach the file in the application
Please be sure to select the correct course code (ie: VIC390), on the form. 
2) Course description with Bibliography
3) Supervisor's letter of support
4) Unofficial Transcript

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

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 July 15, 2023.

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 15, 2023.