COL 1000H FACULTY SEMINAR: THE BASIS FOR COMPARISON
Coordinator: U. Esonwanne
Time: Fall term, Fridays, 2-4
This course is a general introduction to the field of comparative literature, to contemporary theory, and to modern approaches to literary texts. It involves the participation of Comparative Literature faculty discussing issues that arise in the comparison of different literatures or research across disciplines or across media. It is taken by all MA and all first-year PhD students and is intended to provide guidance for more advanced work in specific critical domains.
Evaluation:
Class Participation……………15% (includes attendance)
Weekly response paper…….35% (one double-spaced page every week; submitted every week but then 10 of them resubmitted as a file at the end)
Essay……………………………….50% (3000 words, due January 11)
The paper should address either an issue involving comparison that came up during the course or the comparative implications of the student’s own research project.
Web address: https://complit.utoronto.ca/col1000/
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COL5018H GENDER, AGENCY, AND LIFE WRITING
Instructor: B. Havercroft
Time: Fall term, Tuesdays, 3-5
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.
PRIMARY TEXTS
Brossard, Nicole. Journal intime ou voilà donc un manuscrit (Montréal : Les Herbes Rouges, 1998 [1984]). English translation : Intimate Journal, or, Here’s a Manuscript; followed by Works of Flesh and Metonymies (Toronto : Mercury Press, 2004).
Ernaux, Annie. La Honte (Paris : Gallimard, 1997). English translation : Shame, trans. Tanya Leslie (New York : Seven Stories Press, 1998).
Guibert, Hervé. À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie (Paris : Gallimard, 1990). English translation : To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, trans. Linda Coverdale (London : Quartet Books, 1991).
Wolf, Christa. Kindheitsmuster (Berlin/Weimar : Aufbau Verlag, 1976). Two English translations exist : 1) Patterns of Childhood, trans. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984; and 2) A Model Childhood, trans. U. Molinaro and H. Rappolt (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980).
N.B. The original German edition and English translations of Kindheitsmuster are available in the University of Toronto libraries, or you may order your own copy. English translations of Ernaux’s, Brossard’s and Guibert’s texts are available in the U. of Toronto libraries, or you may order your own copies. See the course schedule document (to be distributed at the first meeting of the class) for further details.
THEORETICAL READINGS
A series of complete bibliographies dealing with the various different theories to be analyzed in this course will be distributed at the first
meeting of the seminar. Students are advised to prepare for the course by doing some preliminary readings :
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York : Routledge, 1990).
———. Bodies That Matter : On the Discursive Limits of « Sex » (New York : Routledge, 1993).
———. Excitable Speech : A Politics of the Performative (New York : Routledge, 1997).
Druxes, Helga. Resisting Bodies : The Negociation of Female Agency in Twentieth-Century Women’s Fiction (Detroit : Wayne State University Press, 1996).
Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories : Making Selves (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1999).
Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics : Feminist Literature and Social Change(Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1989).
Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics : A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation(Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1994).
Gusdorf, Georges. « Conditions et limites de l’autobiographie », in Günter Reichenkron and Erich Haase (eds.), Formen der Selbstdarstellung : Analekten zu einer Geschichte des literarischen Selbstporträts (Berlin : Duncker and Humblot, 1956) : 105-123. (English translation in James Olney, 1980).
Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique (nouvelle edition augmentée) (Paris : Seuil, 1996 [1975]).
Mann, Patricia. Micro-Politics : Agency in a Postfeminist Era (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
Olney, James (ed.). Autobiography : Essays Theoretical and Critical (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1980).
Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography : Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1987).
——. « Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance », a/b : Auto/Biography Studies, Vol. 10, no. 1 (spring 1995) : 17-33.
Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (eds.). Women, Autobiography, Theory : A Reader(Madison : The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
Watson, Julia. « Toward An Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography », in Robert Folkenflik (ed.), The Culture of Autobiography : Constructions of Self-Representation (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1993) : 57-79.
Evaluation:
Written Response to a Theoretical Article: 15%
Oral presentation (30 minutes) : 25%
Research paper (20 pages max.) : 50% : DEADLINE : Monday Dec. 12, 2016
Participation in class : 10%
N.B. The participation mark will be based not only on regular attendance at the seminar, but also on ACTIVE participation in class discussions
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COL 5037H MAGIC PRAGUE – QUESTIONS OF LITERARY CITYSCAPES
Instructor: V. Ambros
Time: Fall term, Wednesdays, 9-12 .
This class will examine a variety of theoretical approaches to literary cityscapes and apply them to the myth of Magic Prague as launched by A. Ripellino and others and questioned by P. Demetz. A number of aspects connected with Prague will be studied based on texts by Guillaume Apollinaire, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruce Chatwin, Jaroslav Hašek, Bohumil Hrabal, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, and
Rainer Maria Rilke. Readings in English and the original.
RECOMMENDED READING
Barthes, Roland “Semiology and Urbanism” in The Semiotic Challenge. Richard Howard (trans.) New York: Hill and Wang, 1988 <1985>: 191-201.
Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX Jahrhunderts” Illuminationen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977: 170-184.
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. London: Picador, 1979.
Demetz, Peter. Prague in Black and Gold. Scenes from the Life of a European City. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.
Ellul, Jacques. The Meaning of the City. Grand Rapids Mich: Eerdmans, 1970.
Gelley, Alexander. “City Texts: Representation, Semiology, Urbanism.” In Politics, Theory and Contemporary Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
Ripellino, Angelo Mario. Magic Prague. Trans. David Newton Marinelli. Ed. M.H.Heim. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.
Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia. A Czech History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Squier, Susan Merill. Women Writers and the City. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984
Evaluation:
Oral presentation (20 minutes): 30%
Research paper (20 pages): 60%
Participation: 10%
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COL5095H GIORGIO AGAMBEN: EXCEPTION AND POTENTIALITY
Instructor: V. Li
Time: Fall term, Wednesdays, 1-3
The writings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben have, in recent years, been widely cited and discussed by literary, social and political theorists. At once erudite and provocative, Agamben’s work calls for a profound reassessment of such fundamental concepts as the human, language, sovereignty, and the politics of life and death. Critical of those forms of decision and definition that lead to lethal states of exception as exemplified in the figure of the homo sacer (the person who can be killed without legal consequences) and the concentration camp, Agamben is alert to the task of keeping open what he calls “potentiality,” the state of non-actualization that is also the modality of the not-yet that holds out the possibility of creativity and hope. This course will examine Agamben’s influential work (The Coming Community, Homo Sacer, State of Exception, The Open and The Use of Bodies among others) in relation to examples drawn from literature (Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians) and our contemporary world (the “war on terror” and the pervasiveness of biopolitics in all facets of life).
Evaluation:
Seminar participation and weekly responses: 20%
Seminar presentation and write-up: 30%
Final essay: 50%
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COL5101H DIASPORIC CITIES: ITINERANT NARRATIVES OF METROPOLES BY TRAVELLERS AND EXPATRIATES
Instructor: A. Sakaki
Time: Fall term, Tuesdays, 10-12
This course will look at six metropoles (Berlin, London, New York, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, Paris) from the perspectives of Japanese visitors such as Mori, Natsume, Nagai, Yokomitsu, Gotô, Horie, and from those of natives and immigrants (Benjamin, Conrad, Wharton, Shi, Gogol, Rilke). Those writers’ accounts of cities in the span of time between the late nineteenth century and late twentieth century are inflected by the itineraries of their movement before and after their experience of the cities and by their peripatetic as well as optical experience of urban spaces of varied historical, social, material and geopolitical conditions. They reveal cities not as cartographical spots but as sites in the traffic of bodies and gazes. The readings (all assigned are available in English, with additional materials to be introduced by the instructor) shall be arranged in such a way that participants can compare each city’s literary mediations by variably invested observers. Accompanying theoretical, critical and photographic texts (e.g., Atget, Benjamin, Brandt, Brassaï, Burgin, de Certeau, Doisneau, Maeda, Ronis, Walker) shall define a conceptual framework for each session.
Evaluation:
Class Participation 10% (each week’s performance shall be assessed accumulatively)
Response Papers 15% (the 1st due February 14 or earlier, 5%; the 2nd due March 21 or earlier, 10%)
Oral Presentation 15% (once during the semester)
Term Paper 60%
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JCY5116H FREUD: CASE HISTORIES
Instructor: R. Comay
Time:
Location:
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.
Evaluation: Class presentation with write-up 30%, participation 10%, final paper 60%
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COL5122H TEXT AND DIGITAL MEDIA
Instructor: R. Bai
Time: Thursdays, 11-1
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).
Evaluation:
Class participation (15%)
Discussion leader (15%)
Response Essay 1 (35%)
Response Essay 2 (35%
COL5044H DISPLACEMENTS: A JOURNEY FROM PETERSBURG TO LOS ANGELES
Instructor: T. Lahusen
Time: Spring term,, Tuesdays 1-3
The course examines the notion of “displacement,” signifying processes of change in and among places of dwelling, flight, production, and exchange through works of fiction, film, literary/cultural theory, and history. Recent theoretical works on place, space, cultural geography, literary and cinematographic archaeology will be examined through novels, films, and scholarly monographs. Starting with the reading of Marshall Berman’s chapter 2 “Petersburg: The Modernism of Underdevelopment” in his All That’s Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982), our journey moves to a series of texts displaying urban and rural spaces in Russia, China, Europe, and North America. Following Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913-14), we will explore the spaces of some utopian/dystopian landscapes of post-revolutionary Russia; the Paris of Benjamin’s Arcades project; the post-socialist space of a Romanian village; and end in the polycentric and fragmented urban space of Los Angeles. Further course material includes the following films: Chen Kaige’s 1984 Yellow Earth and Jia Zhangke’s 24 City (2008). The former is a post-Mao cinematic reflection on the foundational space of Chinese socialism, the latter presents its recent “modernization.” The film Outskirts (Okraina), by the late Petr Lutsik (1998) is a violent and dystopian meditation on post-Soviet “decollectivization,” whereas Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down(1993) showcases a case of post-modern homelessness in present-day Los Angeles through the violent rampage of a man at the end of his rope. The course is designed for students of comparative literature, history, film studies, and cultural geography.
Evaluation:
The grade is based on class participation (10%) presentations (25%), reaction papers (25%), and a final research paper (40%).
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COL5081H BENJAMIN’S ARCADES PROJECT
Instructor: R. Comay
Time: Spring term, Thursdays, 2-4
This course will be devoted to a close reading of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, his posthumously published, unfinished compendium and montage of fragments, quotations and aphorisms on the urban and architectural culture of Second Empire Paris – “capital of the nineteenth century” and the birthplace of consumer capitalism, where the ambiguities of modernity are registered in dramatically new experiences of space and time. While exploring Benjamin’s reading of the various strands of nineteenth-century material culture – fashion, photography, advertising, lighting, railways, exhibitions, department stores, catacombs, etc. – we will consider the implications of his approach for thinking about history, memory, politics, and visual culture today. Our reading of the Arcades will be supplemented with relevant readings from Baudelaire, Marx, Adorno, Kracauer, Bloch, Aragon, Simmel, and Freud as well as contemporary critical theorists.
Evaluation:
Presentation 25%
Final paper 75%
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COL5094H FORMS OF CRITICAL WRITING
Instructor: E. Jagoe
Time: Spring term, Mondays, 11-1
This course considers critical writing that problematizes the demarcations of genre and of private and public discourses, performance and praxis. We will read and discuss a variety of critical texts that seem to demand, because of their generic ambiguity, an attention to form and to writerliness. These texts will be in the form of blogs, online magazines, essays, manifestoes, and books. The seminar will allow graduate students, engaged in a vital search for their own professional writerly voice, a forum in which to analyse the motivations, effects, discomfort, and excitement engendered by such critics and their work. This will be an intensive writing course, with short weekly assignments and various kinds of writing exercises tightly framed around questions of voice, genre, critical intervention, and formal innovation. Writers that we will read may include Lauren Berlant, Kathleen Stewart, Patricia Williams, Alison Krauss, Jennifer Doyle, Lauren Slater.
Evaluation:
Weekly writing assignments 60%
Class participation in workshopping and discussion 40%
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COL 5111H REVENGE, RESISTANCE, RACE AND LAW
Instructor: M. Nyquist
Time: Spring term, Tuesdays, 10-1
Office Hours:
This course will reflect on representations of acts of revenge and resistance that are produced in historical contexts that privilege law’s rule. How is revenge — or its more civil counterpart, “retribution” — related to or differentiated from resistance, whether personal or political, individual or collective? If either revenge or resistance is disparaged, how is its objectionable character established? In what contexts and by what means is resistance represented as legitimate or even positive? We will explore questions such as these by discussing relations among revenge, resistance, and race (in the earlier sense of “people” or “nation” as well as in more current senses) as they appear in a variety of literary texts from three distinct pre-modern eras: ancient Athens and Rome; early modern England, France and Spain (the latter in connection with the Ottoman empire); and the age of Revolutions. Of interest will be the rezeptions geschichte of texts —or, in the case of the Haitian Revolution, events —in which relations among revenge, resistance and race are unstable, have frequently been revisioned, or have been interpreted in radically different terms.
Texts will include: Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Euripides’ Medea and Hecuba, and Livy’s narrative of Rome’s founding in History of Rome; variants of the tale of Rodrigo and La Cava, related to Islam’s conquest of Spain, selected essays by Montaigne, Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, Richard III, and Hamlet, and Milton’s Paradise Lost (selected books); von Kleist’s Amphitryon, The Earthquake in Chile, Betrothal in Santo Domingo, P. Shelley’s Defense of Poetry and M. Shelley’s Frankenstein, and both poetry and prose written in response to the Haitian revolution. Throughout, we will also discuss relevant cinematic representations of both revenge and resistance.
Texts will be ordered by the Bob Miller Bookroom, 180 Bloor St. West, Lower Concourse. Some will be made available on Blackboard.
Evaluation: Evaluation will be based on seminar facilitations (20%) and participation (20%), two shorter (10%) each and one longer (40%) essay….
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COL5125H LITERATURE, TRAUMA, MODERNITY
Instructor: J. Zilcosky
Tine: Spring term, Wednesdays, 1-3
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 One, 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: 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”—reacted to this discourse. Rarely focussing 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, as evidenced by characters unable to give voice to the suffering at the core of their industrialized, belligerent era.
Authors to be studied include E. T. A. Hoffmann, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and, by way of epilogue, W. G. Sebald.
Evaluation:
JFC1813H LITERATURE OF CONTACT AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL THOUGHT 16th-18th CENTURY
Instructor: A. Motsch
Time:
This course analyzes the link between contact literature (travel literature, discovery literature, colonial literature) and the establishment of modernity and its discourses of knowledge. Taking into account the philosophical and political debates between the 16th and 18th century, the course seeks to account for the European expansion, in particular the colonization of the Americas, and the emergence of discourses of knowledge about other cultures.
Two aspects ought to be singled out here: the knowledge produced about «others» and the new consciousness of Europe’s own identity which was profoundly transformed in this very contact. The course follows the hypothesis that the philosophical and modern definition of modern Man is itself a result of the contact between Europe and its others. The discussions of the texts privilege epistemological aspects and anthropological and political thought. More precisely, the goal is to trace the various ways the emergence of the modern subject is tied to its construction of alterity. Literary texts for example will therefore be questioned about their social and political dimensions within the episteme of the time.
A prominent issue will be the intercultural dynamic between the 16th and 18th centuries between Europe and the rest of the globe, but also within Europe itself. The development of new discourses of knowledge will involve texts of very different nature : literary, ethnographic, political, philosophical, historical, etc. Other aspects to be discussed are the issue of literary genres and canon formation, the conditions which make anthropological writing possible and the conceptualization of the «other» (ethnicity, race, religion, gender, etc.)
Evaluation:
Oral presentation 10%
A literature review 10%
Written assignment 70%
Overall assessment 10%
JGC1855H CRITICAL THEORY IN CONTEXT: THE FRENCH-GERMAN CONNECTION
Instructor: W. Goetschel
Wednesdays: Spring term, Location TBA
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 Levinas, 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.
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Updated: November 16th, 2015
