Courses of Interest are non-English Graduate Courses that may be of interest to particular Graduate Students of English. They will be added as the Courses become available.
Department of Classics
CLA5021H The Task of Criticism: Ancient and Modern Explorations
K.Yu Winter S-Term,
Wed 1-4pm
The idea of criticism has deep and conflicted histories reaching back to classical antiquity. The ambit of criticism, the persona of the critic, and the activities, policies, and purposes of criticism continue to evolve, and these changes have informed how classical scholarship is practiced. This course traces conceptions of criticism in ancient texts and in modern scholarship, grounding itself in a suite of central questions: What does it mean to conduct criticism (in its various guises in Classics across philology and history)? What are its functions and how have they changed over time? What competences and expertise does criticism require? What are the scholarly values, knowledge practices, and institutions that mediate the manifold activities of the critic?
We will examine a range of Greek and Latin texts from presocratic writers to the second sophistic that theorize and debate the notion of criticism; we will also explore the products of “critical” practices in Classics, such as commentaries and critical editions. We will complement our readings of ancient texts with attention to recent reflections in literary scholarship (in and beyond Classics, e.g., Guillory’s recent Professing Criticism) that challenge or renegotiate these foundations (e.g., hermeneutics of suspicion; “postcritique”; reparative reading). We will follow the major debates and their transformations to come to a better understanding of the history and legacy of criticism as a practice and distinct form of judgement in Classics.
Centre for Comparative Literature:
Course schedule can be found on the following website: https://complit.utoronto.ca/courses/
Course descriptions can be found on the following website: https://complit.utoronto.ca/course-descriptions-2024-2025/
Fall Term Courses at the Centre for Comparative Literature:
Course Code: COL5018HF
Course Title: Gender, Life-Writing, and Agency
Professor: B. Havercroft
Day: Tuesdays
Time: 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Term: Fall
Summary: In this course, we will focus on issues that are situated at the intersection of four major trends in contemporary feminist literary studies : 1) the unprecedented interest in autobiographical writings, sparked by a profusion of the actual publication of such texts and by the development of a large body of criticism dealing with the numerous forms of life writing; 2) the rapid evolution of specifically feminist theories of autobiography (Gilmore, Smith, Watson) over the past twenty years; 3) current feminist theories of agency and subjectivity (Butler, Druxes, Mann); 4) the recent theoretical inquiry into the category of gender (Butler, Robinson, Scott), especially as it is represented in the literary text.
The seminar will begin with a critical study and problematization of the principal concepts outlined in these four theoretical groupings. We will then proceed with close readings of several works of contemporary life writing, drawn from the French, Québécois and German literary contexts, emphasizing the diverse textual strategies by which female autobiographical subjects are constructed and, in turn, make a claim to agency. In many instances, textual subjects merge both fact and fiction in an effort to become subjects-in-process, subjects with multiple facets that challenge androcentric theories of the supposedly unified, sovereign autobiographical subject ( Gusdorf ), while juxtaposing the personal, the political and the social in their texts. Notions such as the relational self, the writing of trauma and illness, performativity in autobiographical writing, the « death » of the subject and the author, and the problematics of memory (personal, historical, cultural, etc.) will be examined. While the focus will be on various forms of women’s life writing, we will also analyze one male author’s AIDS diary, not simply to further investigate the gendered basis of all writing, but also to examine the particular forms of agency mobilized in autobiographical accounts of illness.
Course Code: COL5100HF
Course Title: The Late Barthes: The Neutral, Mourning, and Photography
Professor: J. Ricco
Day: Thursdays
Time: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Term: Fall
Summary: This seminar examines some of the principal themes in the work of Roland Barthes over what were to be the last three years of his life. Prompted and enabled by the recent publication and translation of his lecture courses at the College de France (in particular Th e Neutral; and Th e Preparation of the Novel), and the mourning diary that he kept in the wake of his mother’s death, the course seeks to understand the central importance of the notion of the neutral, the experience of mourning, the evidence of photography, and the notations on homosexual erotics in Barthes’ writing and teaching from his Inaugural Lecture at the College on January 7, 1977 to his seminal book on photography, Camera Lucida. Other texts by Barthes that we will discuss include: Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes; and Incidents. In addition, we will read critical works on Barthes by Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, D.A. Miller, Diana Knight, Eduardo Cadava, Geoff rey Batchen and others.
Course Code: COL5154HF
Course Title: Searching for Sebald: Fiction, Exile, and the Natural History of Destruction
Professor: J. Zilcosky
Day: Wednesdays
Time: 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Term: Fall
Summary: When the German-English writer, W.G. Sebald, began publishing in the late 1980s, readers reported never having read anything like him. What made his writing so unusual? Was it the unpredictable appearance of grainy photographs only tangentially related to the text? Was it the relentless blurring of fact and fiction, especially through autobiographical narrators, often named “Sebald”? Was it the flatly melancholic depiction of exile? Was it the mystery of genre: Were these autobiographies, novels, collages, travelogues? Or was it Sebald’s paradoxical style: postmodern self-reflection portrayed in elaborate nineteenth-century sentences, including one that extends for over seven pages?
In this course, we will search for “Sebald,” first by considering how his texts without apparent precursors indeed had them: the autofictions of Jorge Luis Borges, the periscopic monologues of Thomas Bernhard, and the photo-embedded stories of Alexander Kluge. We will then dive into Sebald’s great prose fictions – Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz – examining his revolutionary style and the recurrent themes it describes: the unreliability of memory, the catastrophic history of humankind, and the conundrums of a non-Jewish German son of a Wehrmacht officer writing about the Shoah.
These themes touch on contemporary theoretical discourses surrounding trauma, war, postmemory, text-image, and autofiction. We will examine how these theories illuminate Sebald’s and vice versa: how his fiction prefigures such conceptual “discoveries.” By participating in own translations, Sebald likewise anticipates aspects of translation theory.
At the end of the course, we consider Sebald’s influence – following his early death in 2001 – on seminal contemporary writers such as Patrick Modiano, Rachel Cusk, and Jenny Erpenbeck.
Course Code: JCY5116HF
Course Title: Freud: Case Histories
Professor: R. Comay
Day: Thursdays
Time: 1:00 PM – 3-00PM
Term: Fall
Summary: This course will be devoted to reading Freud’s case histories. We’ll be paying close attention to the unstable relationship between the theoretical and the clinical registers in Freud’s text, with particular emphasis on the psychoanalytic concepts of transference, resistance, repetition, working-through, “construction in analysis,” and the end-of-analysis. In addition to the major case studies — Dora, Anna O, Little Hans, Schreber, Wolfman, Ratman –we will also consider the snippets of Freud’s own auto-analysis (e.g. the “specimen dream” in the Interpretation of Dreams, the Autobiographical Fragment, and other first-person texts, including Freud’s early correspondence with Fliess). Our reading of the primary texts will be accompanied by recent theoretical and critical engagements with the case histories, including Jacques Lacan, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Jacques Derrida, Jacqueline Rose, and Eric Santner.
Winter Term Courses at the Centre for Comparative Literature:
Course Code: COL5122HS
Course Title: Text and Digital Media
Professor: R. Bai
Day: Wednesdays
Time: 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM
Term: Winter
Summary: 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).
Course Code: COL5124HS
Course Title: Public Reading
Professor: A. Komaromi
Day: Tuesdays
Time: 1:00 PM – 3-00PM
Term: Winter
Summary: This course considers the formation of publics and public intellectuals, according to some leading theorists, asking: how do we adapt theoretical tools and insights to changing conditions and challenges within a globalized modernity?
A survey of theory and literary texts from western, Soviet and other sources will allow us to examine the concept of the “public” as a fragile construction within democratic society. We will consider how publics and subjects within them may be constituted through shared texts, private reading and public interventions, media, and social networks. Students will be encouraged to think critically about dichotomies of public vs. private, author vs. reader, and producer vs. consumer. We will aim to foster awareness of the potential for autonomy and a critical stance toward power in historical contexts and in the contemporary world of globalized networks and media. We will apply critical scrutiny to concepts of filiation and affiliation, citizenship and representation, asking what public reading means for the past and future of democracy. Readings may include selections from Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Edward Said, Michael Warner, as well as literary readings from Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Walt Whitman, George Orwell, Russian futurists, Soviet nonconformists, and others.
Course Code: COL5125HS
Course Title: Literature, Trauma, Modernity
Professor: J. Zilcosky
Day: Mondays
Time: 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Term: Winter
Summary: In this course, we will examine literary representations of trauma from the early nineteenth century (the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars) to the aftermath of World War I, when “shell shock” brought trauma irrevocably into the public eye. We will begin by examining the discourse of unrepresentability and doubt in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century medical literature, especially in Freudian psychoanalysis: if we can find no somatic source for trauma, how do we know that it exists? We will then investigate how the literature of this period – “modernism” – both reacted to and helped to shape this discourse. Rarely focusing explicitly on traumatic events, this literature only hints at traumatic occurrences – foregrounding instead the problem of representability at the heart of the modern age. Just as the traumatized body no longer points back to a physical pathology, so too does language itself seem to be severed from the object it aims to describe.
Course Code: COL5136HS
Course Title: Space, Place and Power
Professor: H. Bahoora
Day: Wednesdays
Time: 1:00 PM – 3-00PM
Term: Winter
Summary: This seminar provides an overview of scholarship in the spatial humanities, with a focus on the ways that theorizations of space and place have informed aesthetics, culture, and politics. The “spatial turn” in critical theory designates an increased focus on space, place and spatiality across various disciplines to emphasize a geographic dimension as an essential aspect of the production of culture and experience. In the first half of the course, we will read seminal theorists of space whose work reinserted spatiality as essential to the discursive constructions of the categories of modernity and postmodernity. We will then examine how their challenges to historicism transformed understandings of the space-time experience of global capitalism and provided frameworks for expanded and revised theorizations of colonialism and imperialism, gender and sexuality, urbanization and architectural history, geocriticism and ecocriticism, and literary studies. We will investigate how the spatial turn has in recent decades resulted in attempts to map new historical geographies of literary production, and we will consider the methodological implications the spatial turn has had on the transformation of theoretical interventions in literary studies, particularly in postcolonial theory. Authors will include Gaston Bachelard, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Frantz Fanon, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Jean Rhys, Tayeb Salih, Nuruddin Farah, Amitav Ghosh, Assia Djebar, and Mahasweta Devi.
Course Code: COL5152HS
Course Title: World Literature in Theory and Practice
Professor: Z. Mian
Day: Mondays
Time: 1:00 PM – 3-00PM
Term: Winter
Summary: This course will trace the emergence of World Literature as an integral subfield of contemporary literary studies, from the mid-20th century to the present. Contentiously depicted as either the antithesis or ideal of comparative scholarship, World Literature evokes less a singular approach than it does fecund questions concerning literary institutions, circulation, translation, and pedagogy. We will train a literary-sociological lens on the metropolitan production of World Literature while attending to new approaches that stress the latter’s subjective constitution.
COL5152H will acquaint graduate students with key debates in the study of World Literature. We will compare early models offered by Damrosch, Moretti, and Casanova with new work by Hayot, Beecroft, and others. How does a “literary ecology” differ from the “world republic of letters,” and what intellectual commitments configure the world in terms of “significant geographies” rather than as one “literary world system”? We will work through such macro-concepts by foregrounding specific historical debates. We will, for example, reappraise the Ngugi-Achebe debate on the language of African literature through recent work by Jeyifo and Mukoma. Paraliterary institutions such as UNESCO and the university will form significant sites of inquiry as we turn to Brouillette, English, Huggan, Shapiro, and others. The question of translation and the pedagogical stakes of world literature will be brought into focus through Spivak, Venuti, and Apter. We will conclude this comprehensive overview by engaging the contemporary emergence of Global Englishes through scholarship by Anjaria, Joshi, Walkowitz, and Saxena. Students will leave this course acquainted with the full range of methods and debates shaping the study of World Literature today. They will also have developed a considerable appreciation of the long-term constitution of the field.
Course Code: JFC5120HS
Course Title: The Gift — Le don
Professor: A. Motsch
Day: Tuesdays
Time: 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Term: Winter
Summary: 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”?
Gift exchange is fundamental to all societies and these social transactions are consequently ubiquitous in any discourse relating to human beings. Some authors, cultural critics and philosophers have spent considerable effort to think about such questions in a variety of media and in many different artistic forms. Gide’s novel The Counterfeiters and Bataille’s essay on excess, along with all the literature on emerging capitalism by the likes of Balzac and Dickens, all the “rags to riches” stories and the literature on sacrifice in literature and anthropology, shine immediately in a different light. Never short of relevance, Mauss’ essay lends theoretical depth to contemporary debates on Settler-indigenous relations which inevitably turn to issues of gift exchange to rethink social relations and cultural exchanges.
This course will work through some theoretical readings and contrast them with primary examples mostly from literature, film and cultural studies, but also from anthropological and socio-political theory as well as the current debates in the wake of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commission. The texts do not limit themselves though to any single period, nor to any particular national or theoretical tradition.
Students are welcome to register for our courses directly on ACORN. Students are also welcome to contact our Centre if they have any questions.
Department of Religion: www.religion.utoronto.ca
Open for enrollment for any student in SGS. No course add/drop form required. https://www.religion.utoronto.ca/graduate/curriculum-course-info/current-courses
RLG3203HS The Talking Book
Instuctor: Nyasha Junior
Wednesdays 9am to 11am, JHB213
The trope of the “Talking Book” appears within early Black American literature. Those who were not yet literate regarded others moving their lips and reading aloud as seemingly “talking” to the book. The Bible was one of the central works that Africans in the Americas confronted as a written and oral text. This course explores the history and development of biblical interpretation by Black biblical scholars in North America. It considers how these scholars address the use, impact, and influence of biblical texts in African Diasporic cultures and traditions. It examines the disciplinary and methodological diversity of their work as well as their challenges and contributions to academic biblical studies.
RLG2045H Modern Buddhist Fiction
Christoph Emmrich
Mondays 3pm to 5pm, JHB213
(Modern Buddhist Fiction syllabus spring 2025 small.pdf)
Buddhism, the Buddha, and indeed a Buddhist twist on storytelling have shaped modern world literature from its very beginnings. One could in fact argue that one of the many beginnings of modern fiction in many parts of the world is Buddhist and further that Buddhism has consistently played a role in recurring renewals of how to write fiction since the onset of modernity. In this course students will explore that role by analysing key works, in English or in English translation and written between 1879 and today, which either modernize motifs drawn from premodern Buddhist texts or process contemporary material by adopting a Buddhist aesthetic or philosophical stance. That will involve not only reading modern religious fiction in its own right and within the context of its composition and reception in mind, but also confronting the works with the classical sources, both narrative or doctrinal, which they draw from. Students will explore: the beginnings of modern Buddhist fiction in Europe and Asia with Edwin Arnold’s The Light of Asia (1879), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), and Niṣṭhānanda Vajrācārya’s Lalitavistara (1914),
confronting European Orientalist aesthetics with religious reform literature in Asia, the secularization of Buddhist hagiography in Dalit and Marxist 1940-50s narrative literature by B. R. Ambedkar and D. D. Kosambi, 1920s and 1950’s Germanophone and US-American counterculture Buddhist literature with Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha (1922) and Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums (1958), the emergence of post-war Japanese modernism through the processing of WWII in Michio Takeyama’s Burmese Harp (1946), the influence of Buddhism on postmodernist and experimental writing in Roger Zelazny’s SF classic Lord of Light (1967), the collection Nixon under the Bodhi Tree (2004), and in George Saunders’ much-acclaimed Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), right up to recent feminist and queer retellings of the life of the Buddha’s wife Yashodhara in the homonymous novels in Telugu and in Canadian English by Volga (2017) and Vanessa Sasson (2021), respectively, as well as, staying with Canadian literature, in Shyam Selvadurai’s latest novel Mansions of the Moon (2022).
Each session will focus on one book which will be embedded in select readings drawn both from related contemporary Buddhist-inflected writing and from classical Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, and Newar Buddhist sources in translation. The larger question this course will ask is about the importance of religion for poetics and the role of the novel as a space in which authors and readers can experiment globally with both with religious hybridity and literary innovation. “Modern Buddhist Fiction” is a contribution towards connecting the study of the premodern Asian Buddhist classics with modernist, political, avantgarde, and popular fiction from around the world, including Canada, and allowing students to discover the interconnectedness of these worlds and implicit or explicit religious forms of writing academic readers of modern fiction should be made aware of. While keeping in mind Buddhist Studies students’ need to engage with premodern Buddhist literature, it’s core is conceived of as a crossover between the study of religion and the study of literature, reaching out to students who are interested in the literary aspects of religion more broadly, but also speaking to students in English and Comparative Literature, fields in which religion has begun to play an increasingly important role.
RLG3744H Hindu Epics (The Mahabharata)
Arti Dhand
Wednesdays 11am to 1pm, location TBC
Advanced study in specialized topics on Hinduism such as Ramayana in Literature: This course explores how this conception is the result of a historical process by examining documentable transformations in the reception of the Ramayana. Our focus will be on the shift in the classification of the Ramayana from the inaugural work of Sanskrit literary culture (adi-kavya) in Sanskrit aesthetics to a work of tradition (smrti) in theological commentaries, the differences between the Ramayanas ideal of divine kingship and medieval theistic approaches to Ramas identification with Visnu, the rise of Rama worship, and the use of Ramas divinity in contemporary political discourse.
University of Toronto, School of Cities:
For more information: https://schoolofcities.utoronto.ca/learning-sofc/mugs/
Course name: Planning and Designing for Community Power
Course code: PLA1516H1F
Course instructors: Keisha St. Louis-McBurnie and Chiyi Tam
Location: St. George Campus
Dates of course: Tuesdays (Fall term)
Times of course: 12 pm – 3 pm
This course examines how planning and urban design can help create alternative futures that centre community control and power. We begin with an introduction to how settler colonialism and colonial knowledge systems have established our present-day understandings of land, private property and ownership. And in turn, how this has tangibly affected planning and design outcomes and processes. Students will be invited to deconstruct this history to understand what anti-capitalist planning and design could be in relation to land and property.
The task is to use your skills and motivations for planning and design towards eroding intersecting systems of oppression through practice. This class will introduce students to case studies, core tools and alternative techniques in community-based facilitation, narrative storytelling, co-creation and design engagement. Assignments will emphasize practicing these skills while speculating what liberatory planning and design practices could look like by developing an understanding of intersecting systems of oppression. Students will also learn from guest speakers, including designers and architects, planners, community organizers and community engagement specialists.
Students who are not in the Faculty of Geography and Planning should apply by completing this form by August 31, 2024.