COURSE DESCRIPTIONS | 2025-2026
updated: June 2, 2025
FALL TERM
Most Comparative Literature courses are taught at the Centre for Comparative Literature, Isabel Bader Theatre, 3rd floor, Linda Hutcheon Seminar Room (BT319) unless indicated otherwise below. Please click on the course code to see its description.COL1000H FACULTY SEMINAR: THE BASIS FOR COMPARISON
Instructor: E. Cazdyn
Time: Fall term, Wednesdays, 1-3
COL1000H is a general introduction to comparative literature, and to contemporary theory and criticism. Its purpose is to offer all incoming M.A. and Ph.D. students exposure to key issues in the discipline. Organized around the broad theme of “Bases for Comparison,” each of our meetings will explore a particular issue or problem addressed in contemporary scholarship. After briefly reviewing the history of the discipline, we will interrogate a number of the categories foundational to it: language, literature, aesthetics, theory, humanity/humanities, relation, and comparison. We will conclude by reading some exemplary new work in comparative literature, through which we will chart possible directions for our own scholarship, and new challenges for the field.
Evaluation:
Participation: For every meeting of our course, please prepare the following: briefly outline and respond to the biggest question the author is asking in each of our texts, as well as one or two of the smaller/more local/resultant questions that the author asks. Comment on how and when these questions are posed; how/whether/to what extent they are answered; how these questions are positioned in relation to the works of other thinkers; and how the author demonstrates their relevance or importance. Because the theme of our course is “Bases for Comparison,” I recommend that you make a note of anything the text says about comparison, as well as about the kinds of comparisons it makes, and/or anything it says about comparative literature. Include any significant quotations in your document (with page numbers). Prepare this outline in writing and bring it to class every week. You will use this document for your own reference during class discussions—I will evaluate participation based on quality, not quantity. While I understand that life is complicated, please be aware of the general expectation that graduate students attend all meetings of all their courses. If you find it challenging to contribute orally or if extraordinary circumstances prevent you from attending class, you can email your document to me immediately afterwards.
Outline for class contributions: ~1-2 pages, point-form.
20% of total grade.
Keyword Essay: Choose one important critical term from our readings (e.g., freedom, human, queer, form), or a significant/interesting term from a language that you are hoping to work with during your graduate studies (e.g., genre, âcimowin, relación). Write a short essay that synthesizes about three different uses/meanings of this term in order ask a question relevant for literary scholarship. What debates, problems, or important ideas cluster around this term? What do the different meanings of this term help us to see that we otherwise might not? How has the meaning of this term shifted over time, and what might these changes tell us? Are there any issues/problems in translating this term? If so, what do these difficulties indicate? How does this term help you to understand a theoretical issue in a new way? I will offer you an array of keyword essays to consult as you are writing this paper, and you will each meet with me (at least) once during the writing process.
6-7 pages double-spaced, in Times New Roman, MLA citation style.
30% of total grade.
Seminar Paper: Your seminar paper will analyze a text of your choosing (poem, story, novel, film, artwork, etc.). The goal of your seminar paper will be to show how this text addresses or exposes a particular problem or idea discussed in critical theory. Your paper should show how the text asks its readers/viewers to consider this theoretical problem in a new or interesting way. This is a research paper: survey the existing scholarship on the text you have chosen and contextualize your analysis within this ongoing conversation. Your analysis of the text should demonstrate that the existing conversation about the text is, in some significant way, incomplete. Your paper should show how our understanding of the text is improved through your approach. In addition, please also try to show how the existing theoretical conversation could be improved by attending to texts such as the one you are analyzing. In what ways does a text like yours offer its readers/viewers a new way to think about a significant issue? You are invited to use your keyword essay as work toward your seminar paper. Each of you will meet with me (at least) once during the writing process.
50% of total grade.
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COL5081H BENJAMIN’S ARCADES PROJECT
Instructor: Rebecca Comay
Time: Thursdays, 1-3
This course will be devoted to a close reading of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s unfinished and posthumously published montage of fragments, quotations and aphorisms on the urban culture of Second Empire Paris – “capital of the nineteenth century. ” The birthplace of consumer capitalism and the site of numerous failed revolutions and counterrevolutionary innovations, nineteenth century Paris crystallized, for Benjamin – writing in exile from fascist Germany — the multiple ambiguities of modernity itself. Many of these ambiguities were registered in disorienting new experiences of space and time. While exploring Benjamin’s reading of the various strands of visual, literary and architectural culture, we will consider the implications of his approach for thinking about history, memory, and politics today. Our reading of the Arcades will be supplemented with readings from Baudelaire, Blanqui, Fourier, Marx, Adorno, Brecht, Aragon, Simmel, and Freud as well as contemporary critical theorists.
No specific background is required, but it would be helpful to have read Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire beforehand.
Assignments: will likely involve a seminar presentation, short reflection paper, and final essay.
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COL5127H QUEER ETHICS AND AESTHETICS
Instructor: John Paul Ricco
Time: Thursdays, 10-12
This course examines recent work in Queer Theory, Philosophy, Literature, and Visual Culture, in which questions of ethics and aesthetics are of principal concern in thinking about friendship; sexual pleasure; intimacy; decision; anonymity and identity; social encounters and relations. We will read works by: Leo Bersani, Tom Roach, Tim Dean, William Haver, Michel Foucault, Herve Guibert, Jean-Luc Nancy, Lauren Berlant, and others.
Method of Evaluation
- Preparation for and Participation in Weekly Seminar. 25%. Students are expected to thoroughly prepare for each week’s seminar by closely reading all of the assigned texts; developing critical responses to the readings; and formulating questions or statements to be raised during class. The weekly seminars are structured as group conversations, and students are expected to make every effort to contribute to the discussion.
- 3 Response Papers: Critical/Analytical responses to the readings from three separate weeks in the course. 30%
- Research Paper Proposal/Abstract is due by the fourth week of the term.
- Final Paper: Approximately 8,000 words, fully annotated with bibliography.
45%. Due the final week of the term.
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COL5153H LYRIC: POLITICS AND POETIC FORM
Instructor: Mary Nyquist
Time: Tuesdays, 1-3
Of the three large literary genres (epic, drama, lyric), lyric poetry tends to be the least studied; it also often triggers anxiety. In this course, students will learn to identify a variety of lyric poetry’s sub-genres and formal features. We will explore questions such as, what are some of the ways in which historical and political contexts matter? How do poetry’s rhythmical and musical elements manifest themselves, if at all? What social positions or ideological formations are associated with specific sub-genres or forms? In what ways have poets from marginalized communities eschewed or appropriated conventional sub-genres or poetic forms? How have new forms of media contributed to debates about “formalist” and “anti-formalist” positions? To make this manageable, we will focus on (1) early modern and contemporary poetry (2) pastoral poetry, the sonnet, and elegy (3) Euro-colonial and post-colonial contexts. Students will be selecting many of the poems to be studied in class; if they were written in languages other than English, they will be accompanied by translations.
For students of literature, lyric poetry is often radically under-studied, leaving prospective instructors and writers without the knowledge needed to understand, interpret, teach, or write lyric poetry. This course provides an excellent introduction to central formal features and literary debates. Students with advanced expertise will find many new contexts in which to experiment and learn.
Course Objectives
•Learn to reflect on a wide variety of issues relating to the writing and study of lyric poetry
•Acquire the ability to identify a variety of poetic sub-forms and features
•Develop a sense of the historically and culturally specific features of a given set of poems
•Develop ability to analyze innovative appropriations of existing sub-genres, forms or poetic features
Method of Evaluation
Two co-facilitations (25%)
Participation (25%)
Two exercises (10%)
Short essay of 1000 words (15%)
Final essay of approximately 3000 words (25%)
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COL5155H FUELING INEQUITY: ENERGY, EXTRACTIVISM, ENVIRONMENTAL FUTURES
Instructor: Eva-Lynn Jagoe
Time: Wednesdays, 11-1
This course engages in critical work in the areas of energy humanities, energy history, and energy politics, in order to investigate the potential for energy democracy and a just future. We begin with definitions of energy as both a concept and historical phenomenon, examining its mobilization as “power. Next, we interrogate the political and cultural ideologies associated with extractivism and its implications for social and environmental justice. This leads us to analyze competing visions of energy transition and renewable futures. Through interdisciplinary readings in theory, history, literature, and politics, we will scrutinize how these discussions shape our understanding of democracy in the 21st century.
Readings could include texts by Andreas Malm, Cara Daggett, Ursula LeGuin, and Ivan Illich.
Methods of Evaluation
Participation (20%)
Critical Responses (20%)
Found Objects (5%)
In-class presentation (15%)
Final project, including proposal, oral presentation, and final project (40%)
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JCO5121H CLASSICS AND THEORY SEMINAR: THE RHETORIC OF EMPIRE
Instructor: Erik Gunderson
Time: Fridays, 10-12
Roman imperialism unfolded over several centuries. It was a basic, albeit complex, element of life in the ancient Mediterranean. It affected, directly or indirectly, just about everyone of every gender, class, and ethnicity, and often differentially so. Accordingly the question is both too important to ignore but also too large to admit of any comprehensive summary.
We will attempt to explore a specific facet of imperial life. One could call it the putting into discourse of the empire. Narrowly, this is just a matter of listening to what people said about the life in an imperial context. But, in practice, what is said is confusing: it is incomplete, misleading, full of exaggerations, marked by omissions, … Little is ever put in the terms one might most expect. Some people are obviously being coy, but when piercing the veil of so-called veiled speech do we really see “behind it all” quite what one expected? Nor, for that matter, did one speak about the here and now empire in the terms that preceding generations had used to speak of empires. So one cannot just say that we are today making anachronistic demands of yesterday. Something complex was afoot, and it cannot be reduced to a matter of rhetoric vs reality or any such simple schema.
We will survey a variety of authors and genres including orations, essays, political tracts, letters, biographies. Will use these reading to assemble an archive of various episodes where the question of the subject and power were articulated. And we will ponder the contents of this archive as we seek to generate our own account of the structuring fantasies of political subjectivity in an imperial world.
Comparative literature students are encouraged to bring in other episodes from other places and times. The current political moment generates them almost daily.
Methods of Evaluation: Students will give in class presentations and write a final paper.
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SPRING TERM
Most Comparative Literature courses are taught at the Centre for Comparative Literature, Isabel Bader Theatre, 3rd floor, Linda Hutcheon Seminar Room (BT319) unless indicated otherwise below. Please click on the course code to see its description.
COL5122H TEXT AND DIGITAL MEDIA
Instructor: Ruoyun Bai
Time: Wednesdays 10-12
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).
Method of Evaluation
Class participation (15%)
Discussion leader (15%)
Response Essay 1 (35%)
Response Essay 2 (35%)
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COL5126H SPORTS NARRATED: LITERARY AND INTERDISCIPLINARY EXPLORATION OF SPORTS REPRESENTED IN TEXTUAL AND VISUAL MEDIA
Instructor: A. Sakaki
Time: Spring, Thursdays, 10-12
This course explores sports as participatory and spectatorial events in terms of: translation between physical and textual practices; the temporality, spatiality, and agency in the acts of playing and watching of sports; the body, tools, and environment in sport activities; the sporting events and local/global communities; sports for the promotion of ideologies; sports in bildungsroman; homosociality and gender bending; the sports media and fan culture; and the relationship between the grammar of the narrative and the rules of the game in various sports. We read theories (Adorno, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Caillois, Conner, Eco, Gumbrecht, Sartre, Serres, Young) as well as theoretically informed critical works in mobility studies, disability studies, environmental studies, space studies, studies of affordance and prostheses, phenomenology, rhythmanalysis, sound studies, gender studies, and studies of the empire and colonialism. The sessions are thematically arranged and aligned with literary and cinematic sources on sports, by various authors (e.g., Beckett, Bolaño, Cole, Coover, Groff, Hornby, Ishikawa, Murakami, Natsume, O’Brien, Sillitoe, Twain, Vargas Llosa, Vladislavic, Wallace, Wells) and directors (e.g., Chandha, Eastwood, Gordon and Parreno, Hudson, Marshall, Yates).
Method of Evaluation
Participation: 20%
Presentation: 20%
Session Reviews: 20%
Term Paper: 40%
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COL5138H DRAMATURGIES OF THE DIALECTIC
Instructor: Rebecca Comay
Time: Thursdays 1-3
This seminar will explore the constellation of dialectics, theatre, and politics in (and in the wake of) Hegel. We’ll be thinking about some repercussions of Hegel’s infamous pronouncement of the “end of art.” Why does Hegel say that art “no longer counts” as the expression of truth, and what does this imply for the practice of philosophy and for political practice? We’ll look at the ways in which art stages (literally) its own undoing in theatre and the peculiar afterlife of theatre in philosophy as a scene of pedagogy, a performance, and a political spectacle. The first part of the course will focus on selected portions of Hegel’s Aesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit. We’ll then consider Marx’s deployment of the Hegelian dialectic in the Eighteenth Brumaire as he searches (in vain?) for a new revolutionary subject amidst the “farce” of the post-1848 counterrevolution. Finally, we’ll consider some surprising reverberations in Beckett’s Endgame. While the main authors will be Hegel, Marx, and Beckett, we’ll also have occasion to think about other writers (including C.L.R. James, Adorno, Benjamin, Badiou, Karatani,).
Method of Evaluation
Seminar presentation with follow-up written reflection (30%); final paper (70%)
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JFC5129H PERFORMATIVE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACTS: PAINTED AND PHOTOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATIONS OF SELF IN PERSONAL AND POLITICAL TESTIMONIALS
Instructor: Julie LeBlanc
Time: Tuesdays 11-1
“In my view, text and image complement, rather than supplement, each other; since reference is not secure in either, neither can compensate for lack of stability in the other. Because both media are located on the border between fact and fiction, they often undercut just as easily as they reinforce each other.” (T. Adams).
In the autobiographical and historiographic narratives chosen to explore the various ways in which text and image can interact with and reflect on each other, the writers use a highly metalinguistic discourse to discuss the problems of self-referentiality in language and in images in order to reflect on the use of images, paintings and sketches in their visualizations and articulations of selfhood. Edward Ardizzone, Annie Ernaux, Frida Kahlo and Jacques Poulin, all express an awareness of the auto-bio-graphical self as decentered, multiple, fragmented and divided against itself in the act of observing and being. The use of paintings, drawings, figures of ekphrasis and photos (portraits and self-portraits), operate as visual supplements (illustrations) and corroboration (verification) of the autobiographical subjects and their narratives. The introduction or the description of images in autobiographical and fictional autobiographical texts problematizes the status of the autobiographical genre, the complexities underlining the referential, representational, mimetic relationships between self-images and life-writings, etc. The study of theoretical texts pertaining to autobiography and self portraiture (paintings, drawings and photographs) and the relationship between words and images will serve as a basis for our analysis of Ardizzone, Ernaux, Kahlo and Poulin’s autobiographical and historiographic narratives.
PRIMARY TEXTS
Ardizzone, Ed. Diary of a War Artist. Fragments of this illustrated diary will be distributed in class. It will be studied in conjunction with the artistic production of E. Ardizzone conserved at the IWM in London. Copies of images will be distributed.
Ernaux, Annie. The years. Fragments of her illustrated diary published in Écrire la vie will enhance our study of Ernaux’s expansive use of photographic ekphrasis within her memoire.
Kahlo, Frida. Intimate Diary. English translation of her personal diary initially published in Spanish. This illustrated life-narrative will be studied in conjunction with Kahlo’s numerous painted self-portraits.
Poulin, Jacques. Volkswagen Blues. This illustrated text will be studied through historical documents pertaining to indigenous cultures referenced by Poulin.
THEORETICAL TEXTS
A more detailed theoretical bibliography will be provided.
– Adams, Timothy D. Light Writing and Life Writing. Photography in Autobiography. University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
– Doy, Gen. Picturing the Self: changing views of the subject in visual culture. London: I.B.Tauris, 2005.
– Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study of the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
– Hughs, Alex and Andrea Noble. Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 2003.
– Kim, Yeon-Soo. The Family Album. Bucknell University Press, 2005.
– Lejeune, Philippe. Je est un autre. Paris: Seuil, 1980.
– Louvel, L. (Jean-Pierre Montier, et.al.) Littérature et photographie. Rennes, PUR, 2008.
– Mitchell, W.J.T. The Languages of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
– Olney, James. Studies in Autobiography. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
– Sontag, S. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1977.
*Please note that students are invited to work on a corpus of their choice for their final essay and presentation. However, a comparative study including one of the primary texts listed (Ardizzone, Ernaux, Kahlo, Poulin and Barthes) should be used if one chooses to use another text which is not featured in our list of primary texts.
Method of Evaluation
One essay: 65%
One presentation: 20%
Participation: 15%
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JFC5120H THE GIFT — LE DON
Instructor: Andreas Motsch
Time: Tuesdays, 9-11
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.
Method of Evaluation
Bibliography of secondary literature 5%
Critical summary of an article/literature review (5-8 pp) 10%
Class presentation of final paper project (10 minutes) 10%
Final Paper (4000-4500 words) 60%
Overall evaluation (active participation is imperative) 15%
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JGC1855H CRITICAL THEORY: THE FRENCH-GERMAN CONNECTION
Instructor: Willi Goetschel
Time: Tuesdays, 3-5
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 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.
Method of Evaluation:
Participation 10%
Term paper 90%
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JHL1680H Revolutionary Women’s Cultures in East Asia
Instructor: Anup Grewal
Time: Wednesdays 12 -2
This course examines the interrelationship of concepts and practices of what we may term “revolutionary womanhood” and “revolutionary culture” (in the spheres of literature, cinema, arts, mass print media, and cultural associations and institutions) in different modern national, anti-imperialist, and socialist movements of the early to mid 20th c across East Asia. “Revolution” and “woman” were key terms, representing “new” subjectivities, collectivities, and arenas for imagining/enacting the transformation of the political, social and cultural realms in China, Japan and Korea. When brought together under different frameworks of “revolutionary womanhood” what new possibilities emerged for these imagined and real transformations? We will explore the expressions and meanings of “revolutionary womanhood” in different cultural genres and media, examine the historical contexts of each revolutionary moment/movement, and engage with scholarship on the intersections between ideas and practices of revolution, culture, and gender. While attentive to particular local contexts, we will also explore the intra-regional circulation of concepts of “revolution”, “culture” and “woman” and their changing meanings across the period in East Asia. We will also engage in further comparative analysis with other revolutionary cultures transnationally, including but not limited to pre and post 1917 Russia, Europe and the U.S., with which ideas and practices of “revolution” and “new womanhood” in East Asia had deep practical and imagined connections. In this sense, we will explore the transnational (or internationalist) dimensions and visions of revolutionary women’s cultures in East Asia.
All primary works will be in English translation, but students with knowledge of Chinese, Japanese and Korean are encouraged to read works in the original languages. Students whose research interests include histories of 19th and 20th c revolutionary movements and cultures and questions of gender outside of East Asia are very welcome to join the course.
Method of Evaluation
Participation in discussions (15%); Two short analysis papers in first half of course (20%); In-class leading of a discussion (10%); Final research project, including proposal and annotated bibliography, first draft, oral presentation and final paper (55%)
