Courses of Interest are courses taught by faculty who are not cross-appointed to English. Courses of Interest will be posted on this page as they become available.
Graduate Students in English must consult with their Associate Director or Director of their program and get permission before enrolling in one of these courses.
TBA as courses become available.
Centre for Comparative Literature
Courses of Interest:
https://complit.utoronto.ca/
For room information, see ACORN, QUERCUS, contact the instructor, or contact the Graduate Unit offices.
Fall term:
COL1000HF The Bases for Comparison / S. Dowling
COL5016HF Art and Politics: Bertolt Brecht, Robert Lepage / P. Kleber. Location: Robarts Library, Media Commons, Room RL3025
COL5126HF Sports Narrated / A. Sakaki
COL5142HF Women and Sex and Talk / J. Ricco
COL5146HF Written in Blood / C. James
COL5149HF The Art of Combat: Violence, Culture, and Competition (New course) / J. Zilcosky
JFC5025HF Feminism and Postmodernism: Theory and Practice / B. Havercroft
JHL1680HF Revolutionary Women’s Cultures in East Asia / A. Grewal
Spring Term:
COL5081HS Benjamin’s Arcades Project / R. Comay
COL5133HS Comparative Modernisms / H Bahoora
COL5150HS The Palliative: Art, Politics, Ecology, Medicine (New course) / E. Cazdyn
COL5151HS The Theatre of Science (New course) / M. Revermann
COL5152HS World Literature in Theory and Practice (New course) / Z. Mian
JFC1813HS Literature of Contract and Anthropological Thought 16th-18th Century / A. Motsch
JGC1855HS Critical Theory – The French-German Connection / W. Goetschel
JLV5134HS Theories of the Novel / K. Holland
Go to the Centre for Comparative Literature website to read their course descriptions. Remember, Graduate Students in English must consult with their Associate Director or Director of their program before enrolling in one of these courses.
Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies
Courses of Interest:
https://www.cdtps.utoronto.ca
For room information, see ACORN, QUERCUS, contact the instructor, or contact the Graduate Unit offices.
TBA
Remember, Graduate Students in English must consult with their Associate Director or Director of their program before enrolling in one of these courses.
Centre for Medieval Studies
Courses of Interest:
https://www.medieval.utoronto.ca
For room information, see ACORN, QUERCUS, contact the instructor, or contact the Graduate Unit offices.
TBA
Remember, Graduate Students in English must consult with their Associate Director or Director of their program before enrolling in one of these courses.
Cinema Studies Institute
Courses of Interest:
https://www.cinema.utoronto.ca/
CIN1100HF: The Textual Object: The Beau Travail Project
Corinn Columpar
FALL: Mondays 3-5, Tuesdays 1-3
For room information, see ACORN, QUERCUS, contact the instructor, or contact the Graduate Unit offices.
This course takes as its starting point a single text: Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. Upon its release in 1999, Beau Travail was widely lauded, winning recognition as one of the best films of the year and earning prestigious awards for both Denis and cinematographer Agnés Godard. Since that time, its reputation has only grown. In the 2012 edition of the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll, it was ranked number 78; ten years later, in 2022, it rose to the number seven spot on the list to become one of two films directed by women among the top ten. One factor that has contributed to the growth in stature of Beau Travail is the extraordinary wealth of critical literature it has inspired from film and media scholars working with a wide range of methodological approaches and intellectual concerns. In this course we will use that critical literature as a way to study Beau Travail in a sustained manner and, in the process, to survey those methods and topics that have proven most historically salient and fruitful in cinema studies. More specifically, as we view Beau Travail through the lens of different discourses— including adaptation studies, auteurism, performance studies, postcolonialism, queer theory, film philosophy, and formal analysis—and put it in conversation with an array of other films, we will map the theoretical contexts in which meaning emerges as well as the intertextual connections such contexts provoke. In this way we will not only gain insight into a single film text, but also the stakes and possibilities of the critical processes that we, as film and media scholars, engage in more generally.
CIN3004HS: Documentary and Nonfiction Media: The Essay Form
Brett Story
WINTER: Tuesdays 9-1
For room information, see ACORN, QUERCUS, contact the instructor, or contact the Graduate Unit offices.
The “essay” derives its meaning from the French “essayer”: to try or attempt. Provisionally situated at the intersection of the documentary, experimental, and personal modes of cinema, the essay film defies easy classification while also pointing to compositional principles of non-linearity, association, and fragmentation. The essay has thus been described as interdisciplinary—even anti-disciplinary—a meta-practice that interrogates the entanglements of images, language, history, politics, geography and subjectivity in the production of meaning.
In his introduction to The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, Timothy Corrigan argues that “essays describe and provoke an activity of public thought …..The essay presses itself as a dialogue and reflective communal experience, stretched between the intimate other of self and the public ‘other’ that surrounds a self. In this sense, one of the chief defining features of the essay film and its history becomes eliciting an active intellectual response to the questions and provocations that an unsettled subjectivity directs at its public.” Together, we will consider the essay film as an expressive form, one which bridges and disturbs distinctions between the literary and the cinematic, portraiture and analysis, the public and the private, thought and feeling.
This graduate seminar class will explore the history, theory and practice of the essay film, from its origins in the early 20th century to its contemporary manifestations in the age of digital media. The aim of this seminar is twofold: First, to consider the history of the essay film as form and method, examining the literary and photographic heritage from which it emerges and the evolution of documentary and avant-garde cinemas within which it sits, albeit uneasily. Second, to explore the essay as a mode of critical practice. We will consider the affordances of the essay form within cinematic practice and engage the film essay’s interdependent relationship with the literary essay. We will watch essays, read essays, write essays and make essays, all while asking how form begets experiments with observation and cognition across the cinematic field, and with what consequence.
CIN3008HS: Topics in Film and Media History: Cinema, Modernity, and the Global South
Rakesh Sengupta
WINTER: Tuesdays 1-3, Thursdays 1-3
For room information, see ACORN, QUERCUS, contact the instructor, or contact the Graduate Unit offices.
The emergence of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century has often been associated with shocks and flows of Western modernity. This course will explore early cinema’s relationship with modernity, modernism and modernization through a more global and inclusive understanding of film history. The course will ask two core questions: How helpful is the ‘modernity thesis’, as theorized by Euro-American film scholars, in historicizing cinemas of the Global South? And more broadly, how does film history help us understand the cultural lag and socio-economic disparity that characterizes the deep divide between the Global North and South? Our objective in this graduate course will be to provincialize any universalist understanding of technological, social and aesthetic transformation that emerges in Euro-American film cultures and gets diffused in other parts of the world. We will instead globalize film history by exploring the multiple modernities of film cultures in the Global South and beyond, and also understand how they open up new ways of thinking about media temporalities through broader concerns in social and critical theory.
CIN3010HF: Topics in Film and Media Theory: Cinematic Mobilities
Alberto Zambenedetti
FALL: Fridays 10-2
For room information, see ACORN, QUERCUS, contact the instructor, or contact the Graduate Unit offices.
In his 2007 volume Mobilities, John Urry defines the “mobility turn” as “a different way of thinking through the character of economic, social and political relationships.” According to the late sociologist, the “mobility turn is post-disciplinary” and “connects the analysis of different forms of travel, transport and communications with the multiple ways in which economic and social life is performed and organized through time and across various spaces.” (6) Connecting the “spatial turn” to the “infrastructural turn” of contemporary humanities and social studies, the mobilities paradigm helps us historicize and interrogate time-based media’s complex and layered relationship with movement and circulation. The theoretical framework employed by this course seeks to illuminate and bring together storied symbioses (cinema and railway, for example) as well as make new connections (location tourism and art photography), revisit classic genres (the road movie, the tourist film), and re-examine classic figures (the flâneur, the driver), vehicles (the automobile, the airplane), actions (running, flying), and affects (wanderlust, vertigo).
Remember, Graduate Students in English must consult with their Associate Director or Director of their program before enrolling in one of these courses.
Department of Art History https://arthistory.utoronto.ca
The Department of Art History will be offering the following two courses in the 2023-24 academic year. Professor Mark Cheetham would be happy for your students to enrol, so please circulate this to any students you think might be interested. More information about the full Art History graduate course offerings is available on the Department of Art History website. Interested students should submit a completed Add/Drop course form to graduate.arthistory@utoronto.ca.
For room information, see ACORN, QUERCUS, contact the instructor, or contact the Graduate Unit offices.
FAH1870H: The Visual Arts in Canada in International Perspective
Fall term | Fridays 10am-1pm
Course description:
Can there be a ‘Canadian’ art, and if so, what are its parameters in this rapidly changing country? Focusing on art made in Canada in its interactions with international practices, we will investigate defining frames in the fields of art history and visual culture studies today. Art historians habitually use national groupings to organize our field and employ genres such as landscape, land art, and public art to contour thinking. Since Montesquieu and Winckelmann in the 18th century, scholars in the west have also relied on what Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann calls the “Geography of art,” defined as “the effect of the environment, cultural and natural, on what humans have created.” The “contemporary” as a category often depends on the assumption that it is a global, not national, phenomenon. To test these and cognate practices, in 2023-4, we will examine the idea of the (far) north in Canada as a category in eco-critical art history and in art making that aspires to be global. Art and artists working in and thematizing the far north in Canada will be discussed in comparison with those in cognate geographical regions elsewhere.
FAH1410H: Artwriting
Winter term | Mondays 10am-1pm
Course description:
‘Artwriting’ can be thought of as writing ‘about’ art in the broadest senses, both thematic and spatial, including a website or monograph on an artist, an article or blog, a text in philosophical aesthetics, texts by artists, art that employs written or aural language, or a label in a museum. We will consider these practical and theoretical practices in European and North American contexts from c. 1750 to the present. We will discuss the relationships between and mutual definition of text and image, the institutional contexts of artwriting, and the import of geographical locale and cultural assumptions to the types of imagery and text produced.
In 2023-24, we will focus on published and unpublished travel narratives from the 18th and 19th centuries as artwriting, specifically as imagetexts (Mitchell) and iconotexts (Louvel). We will use Arctic voyages from the Anglosphere and Nordic countries as the anchor for comparative studies of illustrated travel literature. We will discuss the complex infrastructural media of voyages on land, sea, and in the air (often together), oral and written accounts (some Indigenous, others Western, often in their intersections), mapmaking, publishing protocols, tourism, early guidebooks, and developments in reproductive media technologies – from wood engraving to chromolithography to photography – using period documents at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and the Toronto Public Library. Theoretical perspectives from media theory, eco-critical art history, and analyses of empire, imperialism, and colonialism will be examined in the context of illustrated travel publications.
Remember, Graduate Students in English must consult with their Associate Director or Director of their program before enrolling in one of these courses.