2026-2027 Course Descriptions
FALL
COL1000H FACULTY SEMINAR: THE BASES FOR COMPARISON
Instructor: E. Cazdyn
Time: Fall, Wednesdays, 1-3
Description 1:
COL1000 is an introduction to Comparative Literature, and to contemporary theory and criticism. Rather than focus on the history of Comp Lit or to survey the key debates within the field, we will explore Comparative Literature as a Problematic. A problematic can be identified not by specific positions (whether of an aesthetic, political, or philosophical kind), but rather by the commitment to a specific complex of problems, whose formulations are always in movement and historical transformation together with their object of study (in this case, literature itself). Along with classic Comp Lit problems such as narrative, language, and cross-cultural critique, this seminar will focus on temporality, spatiality, subjectivity, ontology, and discipline. Each student will also be encouraged to identify, develop, and articulate their own “complex of problems” as it relates to their critical desires and budding graduate project.
Description 2:
Despite its impressive history of opening space free from the gatekeepers of traditional scholarship, Comparative Literature cannot help but get sucked back into the highly disciplined university. This is especially the case today when Comparative Literature’s calling card, that thing called “Critical Theory”, has been cast-off by many in the Humanities as opportunistically as it was first appropriated by them. This leads to the current situation in which the once enfant terrible (Comp Lit) seems to have lost its raison d’être. Consequently, some comparatists have taken the bait and fallen back into Comparative Literature’s phantasmatic origins, trumpeting elitist language skills as they go about their business comparing different literary and cultural canons and, in the process, re-establishing all the dualisms and moralizing approaches that Comp Lit was famous for breaking down in the first place. But this new orthodoxy is not the only path that Comparative Literature is destined to take. To introduce incoming MA and Ph.D. students to the history and key debates of Comp Lit, this seminar will experiment with different Comp Lit futures as a way to inspire each student to claim our changing field for themselves.
Evaluation:
- Written Problematic: 50%
- Spoken Presentation of Problematic: 30
- 1-Page Responses and Participation: 20%
…
…
COL5047H THE TWO AVANT-GARDES
Instructor: A. Komaromi
Time: Fall, Tuesdays, 1-3
The concept of two avant-gardes refers to the “historical avant-garde” (Burger) and the neo-avant-garde (Buchloh, Foster). However, this course will also compare two broad contexts for the return of the avant-garde after WWII: the context of late capitalism – in the U.S. and Western Europe – and that of late socialism, in the USSR and Eastern Europe. Historical movements such as Dada and Surrealism, Futurism, Suprematism and Constructivism did not simply exhaust the avant-garde project: neo-avant-garde art arguably comprehended that project for the first time (Foster). However, if we must read avant-garde gestures in their historical moment(s) we must also read them in their socio-political contexts. We will discuss how the avant-garde challenge to bourgeois principles of the autonomous work and the expressive author/artist took on new significance in the post-war late capitalist west. We will compare that western return to the return in late socialism, in which the civic and spiritual energy derived from the lost avant-garde legacy was channeled toward non-conformism and anti-utopian critique (Groys). We will consider what this highly mobile international legacy of avant-garde experimentation might reveal vis-à-vis critique, solidarity and social transformation in the contemporary moment.
Readings from: John Bowlt, Benjamin Buchloh, Peter Burger, Hal Foster, Clement Greenberg, Boris Groys, Rosalind Krauss, Lev Rubinstein, Leo Steinberg and others.
Evaluation:
Class participation 15%
Assigned presentations 20%
Final Project bibliography and abstract 25%
Final Project 40%
…
…
COL5156H AGAMBEN & FOUCAULT: BEYOND BIOPOLITICAL CRITIQUE
Instructor: J. Ricco
Time: Fall term, Thursdays, 10-12
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and French philosopher Michel Foucault are two of the primary innovators of the widely influential notion of bio-politics, with Agamben’s “homo sacer” series building on Foucault’s work, specifically his project on the history of sexuality, and his Paris lectures on “The Birth of Biopolitics” and “The Hermeneutics of the Subject.” Yet while widely known for their respective critiques of bio-political regimes—including the genealogies and contemporary formations of such regimes—both thinkers equally embarked on projects that found resistances to these apparatuses in art and aesthetics. In this seminar we will consider their less-often-studied aesthetic philosophies alongside their more well-known bio-political critiques. In doing so, we will seek to understand how the aesthetic provides a counter to the politicization of life, as it pertains to non-human, inhuman, impersonal, and inanimate forms of existence. In addition to Agamben and Foucault, we will also read work by Mbembe, Bersani, Haver, Hartman, Berlant, Povinelli, Quashie, Best, Stiegler, and others.
Evaluation:
weekly participation; a seminar paper developed from an initial prospectus along with an annotated bibliography of key sources.
Weekly Participation: 30%
Paper Prospectus and Annotated Bibliography: 30%
Seminar Paper: 40%
…
…
COL5157H LYRIC BEYOND CONTAINMENT
Instructor: S. Dowling
Time: Fall, Thursdays, 12-2
Lyric is, in terms of length, the smallest of the major literary genres. Its component part, the stanza, is likened to a room that encloses. As recent scholarship has shown, lyric poetry also tends to be imagined as cloistered—as separate from politics and from the social. In this course, we will read key texts in lyric theory, seeking to understand how this genre has been understood in history and in the present. We will focus on a series of tropes said to define lyric: confession, overheard speech, address to an absent figure, among others. We will study the appearance of these tropes in lyric poems, examining how theories of lyric intersect with and illuminate avowedly “political” subjects, including surveillance, incarceration, forced disappearance, and so on. We will also examine sequence of texts that “uncontain” lyric, combining it with land art in order to literalize or concretize some of the genre’s central tropes. Key theorists may include: John Stuart Mill, Theodor Adorno, Gérard Genette, Barbara Johnson, Jonathan Culler, and Fred Moten. Key poets/artists may include: Ovid, Raúl Zurita, and Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe).
Evaluation:
In-class participation: 20%
Close reading paper (5 pages, double-spaced): 30%
Research paper (18-22 pages, double-spaced) 50%
…
…
JCO5121H NECROPOLITICS
Instructors: V. Wohl and R. Comay
Time: Fall, Thursdays, 4-6
In 2003, Achille Mbembe coined the term necropolitics to describe a contemporary political order oriented toward the production of death. Departing from Foucault’s concept of biopower as the management and administration of the living, necropolitics names “forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.” From classical antiquity, through the West’s long history of colonialism, slavery, and genocide, Mbembe’s concept has never been more pressing than it is today.
This course brings together a wide array of texts and artifacts– ancient and modern, written and visual– to examine the production of “death worlds”: individual, collective, and planetary. We aim to explore both the theoretical concept of necropolitics and some of the specific cultural and historical forms it has taken, from the ancient world to the present.
Each week will juxtapose a literary and/or visual object with a theoretical text. Our discussions will draw on contemporary debates about mourning and memory, racial capitalism and slavery, settler colonialism, border regimes, carcerality, illness and disability, gender violence, genocide, ecocide, and nuclear holocaust. We welcome students from diverse disciplines and encourage them to bring their own expertise and interests to the discussion.
Texts and authors will include:
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer
Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics
Glenn Coulthard, Red Skin, White Mask
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection
Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim
Jacques Derrida, Death Penalty
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
Eyal Weizmann, Hollow Land
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding
Book of Lamentations
Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur
Aristotle, Politics
Aeschylus, Persians
Sophocles, Antigone
Euripides, Trojan Women and Hecuba
Homer, Iliad
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
W.G. Sebald, A Natural History of Destruction
Werner Herzog, Lessons of Darkness
Lars von Trier, Melancholia
Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham et al, No Other Land
Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege
Evaluation:
Assessment will be based on engaged contribution to the discussion (10%), an oral presentation (30%), and a final essay (60%)
…
…
JFC5025H FEMINISM AND POSTMODERNISM: THEORY AND PRACTICE
Instructor: B. Havercroft
Time: Fall, Tuesdays, 3-5
This course will examine the complex and controversial relationship between feminism and postmodernism, as this encounter is staged in both theoretical and fictional writings. While many of the «canonical» theoretical texts on postmodernism were penned by male scholars (Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo, Hassan, Scarpetta, etc.), who largely ignored questions of feminism, gender, and women’s artistic practices, feminist critics (Jardine, Butler, Suleiman, Nicholson, Yeatman, and others) soon intervened in the debate. As these latter theoreticians demonstrated, many of the notions characterizing postmodern theories and literary texts were in fact concerns common to feminist thought : the crisis of patriarchal master narratives and the ensuing emphasis on localized, small narratives; the criticism of binary, hierarchical oppositions (center/margin, life /art, culture /nature, mind/body, masculine/feminine); the endeavour to privilege the heterogeneous, the plural, and the hybrid; and the problematization of the subject, of representation, and of language. Doubtful as to whether disseminated subjects are capable of agency and effective political action, other feminist scholars (di Stefano, Hartsock) still question the possibilities of constructive intersections between feminism and postmodernism. Drawing on the principal feminist theories in the postmodern debate, we will study the contentious theoretical issues outlined above, before turning to an analysis of an international corpus of postmodern literary narratives written by women, which construct « strategic subjectivities » (Kaplan) and « forms of common action » (Mouffe), combining ethical perspectives and aesthetic experimentation. Our close readings of these texts will pay careful attention to textual devices typical of postmodern texts (see Hutcheon), such as the extensive use of intertextuality, the recycling and rewriting of mythological, religious, and historical figures and events, the questioning of major binary oppositions underpinning Western thought, genre hybridity, the representation of the author in the text, and so on.
Since this course will deal with feminist theories of postmodernism, as well as with feminist supplements to and criticisms of postmodern thought, it would be most helpful for students to have some prior knowledge of « male » theories of postmodernism (see certain references listed below) before beginning the course, although this is not a prerequisite.
PRIMARY TEXTS:
Blais, Marie-Claire. Soifs. Montréal : Boréal, 1995. (English translation if required : These Festive Nights, Concord, Ont. : House of Anansi Press, 1997).
Brossard, Nicole. Baroque d’aube. Montréal : l’Hexagone, 1995. (English translation if required : Baroque at Dawn, Toronto : McClelland and Stewart, 1997).
Carter, Angela. The Passion of New Eve. London : Gollanczy, 1977. Cixous, Hélène. Le livre de Promethea. Paris : Gallimard, 1983. (English translation if required : The Book of Promethea, Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1991).
Wolf, Christa. « Selbstversuch : Traktat zu einem Protokoll », in C. Wolf, Drei unwahrscheinliche Geschichten. Berlin : Aufbau Verlag, 1974. (The English translation, « Self-Experiment : Appendix to a Report », will be provided .)
THEORETICAL READINGS:
The complete list of theoretical texts, as well as extensive bibliographies on feminism and postmodernism, will be distributed at the first meeting of the seminar. Students are advised to prepare for the course by doing some preliminary readings :
Bertens, Hans. The Idea of Postmodernism : A History. London/New York : Routledge, 1995.
Boisvert, Yves. Le Postmodernisme. Montréal : Boréal, 1995.
Butler, Judith. « Contingent Foundations : Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’ », in J. Butler and Joan Scott (eds.), Feminists Theorize the Political. New York : Routledge, 1992, pp. 3-21.
Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis : Configurations of Woman and Modernity. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1985.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism : History, Theory, Fiction. New York : Routledge, 1988.
Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne. Paris : Minuit, 1979.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Le postmoderne expliqué aux enfants. Paris : Galilée, 1988.
Michael, Magali Cormier. Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse : Post-World War II Fiction. Albany : SUNY Press, 1996.
Nicholson, Linda (ed.). Feminism/Postmodernism. New York : Routledge, 1990.
Paterson, Janet. Moments postmodernes dans le roman québécois. Ottawa : Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 2e édition, 1993.
Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions : Revisiting the Postmodern. London/New York : Routledge, 1989.
Evaluation:
Oral presentation : 30%
Research paper : 60%
Participation : 10%
…
…
SPRING
COL5133H COMPARATIVE MODERNISMS
Instructor: H. Bahoora
Time: Spring, Wednesdays, 1-3
This course critically examines the spatial, temporal, and aesthetic parameters of global literary modernism. The “global” turn in modernist studies has expanded the spatial terrain of the field and the time of modernism itself. In this course, we will read a range of modernist fictions that break our geographical and temporal expectations of what qualifies as a modernist text. Our focus will be on how interpreting modernism as a movement of multidirectional flows and exchanges has fundamentally reconstituted the traditional canon and has redrawn notions of modernist style, genre and periodization. The course’s transnational approach considers how the contact zones of the colonized “periphery” were instrumental to the making of European modernism, and how interrogations of discourses of primitivism have been central to the project of “globalizing” modernist studies. In our examination of non-European modernisms, we will focus on the relationship between anti-colonialism and modernism and the ways that colonial intellectuals repurposed modernist notions of aesthetic autonomy to agitate against colonial domination. By reading modernist texts from a range of colonial literary traditions (African, Arabic, Caribbean), we will excavate how the aesthetic qualities of modernism have been redefined to accommodate anti-colonial and post-colonial literary modernisms. Colonial writers and artists appropriated indigenous cultural forms to stylistically dissociate their aesthetic production from European art and literature. Therefore, a significant component of the course addresses how stylistic qualities traditionally associated with modernist aesthetics—self-consciousness and interiority, formal adventurousness and textual obscurity, fragmentation and ambiguity—are reconstituted and often abandoned in modernist fictions of the colony and postcolony.
Authors include: Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, James Clifford, Jed Esty, Susan Stanford-Friedman, Simon Gikandi, Partha Mitter, Olive Schreiner, Karel Čapek, Mulk Raj Anand, Chinua Achebe, Tayeb Salih, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.
Evaluation:
Participation 20%
Presentations: 20%
Bi-Weekly Response Papers: 20%
Final Paper: 40%
…
…
COL5149H THE ART OF COMBAT: VIOLENCE, CULTURE, AND COMPETITION
Instructor: J. Zilcosky
Time: Spring, Tuesdays, 2-4
Why do humans engage in combat sports? Why was wrestling our first sport, followed quickly by boxing? Scholars of antiquity claim that this was to honor the gods. Experts on today’s professional wrestling contend that it satisfies our need for melodrama. Sociologists consider combat sport to be a safety valve that protects civilizations from more extreme violence.
In this course, we will examine history not through the normal questions: How did people work? Form governments? Create art? Instead, we will ask: How did they fight? And what do their chosen forms of combat tell us about them? We will investigate fighting’s chronological arc, asking how this mixture of violence, competition, and sex has changed over time – all the while capturing the human imagination. When ancient cultures invented sport-combat, they aimed to stage and contain their most primitive urges: two people embraced aggressively yet did not kill or violate the other. To this day, such unusual events still draw crowds – and participants – from all over the world.
We will analyze artefacts, literature, and visual art beginning with accounts of hand-to-hand combat among the world’s ancient gods and heroes: Gilgamesh, Heracles, Odysseus, Krishna, and Muhammad. We will discuss Jacob wrestling in the Bible and the grappling of Socrates and of the most famous medieval protagonists: Beowulf and Siegfried. We will engage with indigenous traditions and with female fighters who have subverted the masculinist stereotype. Theoretical texts by Plato, Roland Barthes, and Jennifer Doyle will augment our analyses. The aim is to catalyze new thinking about sport, combat, and civilization itself.
Evaluation:
- Class Participation: 15%
- Analysis and contextualization of one artefact, image, or text/film excerpt: 15%:
- In-Class Presentation: 20%
- Final Paper: 50%
…
…
COL5158H LITERARY TRANSLATION NOW
Instructor: Z. Mian
Time: Spring, Thursdays, 2-4
This seminar explores the theoretical, practical, and institutional dimensions of literary translation in the 21st century. It takes seriously the notion that literary works can both produce and challenge translation theory, and so we will read fictive works alongside contemporary theory that foregrounds diverse literary histories and cultures. Rather than attempt a survey of key texts, the course modules tackle recurrent questions in theorizing and practicing translation. To whom does a translation belong, and to what degree should the translator be visible in a work? How have theorists and creative writers challenged or buttressed the belief in literary originals, and how has the notion of textual “fidelity” informed public and scholarly debates on translation? Can the decision to not translate a work be a moral one, and how does the power differential between two linguistic cultures influence the ethics of translation? These are some of the questions this course will address, and which will form the backbone of our discussions and written work across the semester.
Evaluation:
Class Participation (25%)
Review Essay (25%)
Final Paper Proposal (15%)
Final Paper (35%)
…
…
JGC1854H THEORIES OF CULTURE
Instructor: W. Goetschel
Time: Spring, Wednesdays, 3-5
Theories of Culture introduces students to critically relevant theories of culture such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Ernst Cassirer, Antonio Gramsci, Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, and Homi Bhabha. The course is meant to complement the strong offering across literature departments and the Centre for Comparative Literature with a course that looks at the larger theoretical underpinnings that frame theories of readings and interpretation of all sorts. How do concepts of culture and cultural production frame our understanding of the function of literature, reading, and interpretation, etc.
The course offers the opportunity to comprehend the function of the humanities in the larger context of the discourse on the meaning of culture and cultural production and gives access to the resources that have addressed this challenge but remain untaught because of their interdisciplinary nature. Learning outcomes: A strong and developed grasp of the meaning and function of culture.
Evaluation:
…
…
JLA5082H THE RHETORIC OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Instructor: A. Sakaki
Time: Spring, Tuesdays, 10-12
This course concerns the way that photography, as the product and the process, and as the practice and concept, has inspired the narrative of formative questions regarding agency, temporality, and space, and has challenged—or yielded to—the narrative’s power/desire to make sense. Particular attention will be paid to rhetorical complicity and coercion of the two modes of representation which both emerged in the modern and nationalist age, and persist, in the wake of the newer media, as dominant registers of the everyday and departures from there. Participants read and discuss seminal theoretical literatures (e.g., Bal, Barthes, Batchen, Bazin, Burgin, Flusser, Hirsch, Metz, Mitchell, Sontag), photo roman (e.g., Abe, Berger, Calle, Cole, Pamuk), and narratives about photography (e.g., Calvino, Cortázar, Guibert, Horie, Kanai, Proust, Tanizaki, Vladislavic), along the theme for each session. Primarily a seminar, short lectures and students’ presentations will complement discussion sessions with materials that may not be accessible to all the members.
Evaluation:
Class participation 10%; oral presentation 20%; response papers (2-3 pgs) 20% (10% x2); term paper (20–30pgs) 50%
…
