“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 autobiographical 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.

According to many rhetoric theoreticians of the Antiquity, allegory is an «extended metaphor». However, allegory does not consist solely in a 'figure of thought.' It also refers to a hermeneutical process called 'allegorism.' Allegorism studies myths, but also, for instance, biblical exegesis. Allegory and allegorism are key concepts for understanding fine arts, religion, and literature in Western culture from Quintilian to Walter Benjamin, Northrop Frye, Paul de Man, Craig Owen, and Umberto Eco. A figure constantly criticized for its coldness, and at the same time a venerable interpretive process often mocked for its arbitrariness, allegory allows us to study hermeneutics with regard to notions of literal and figurative meaning.

At the end of the course, students will be able to discuss major Western texts on allegory and to understand their role in the history of literary theory. Students will be able to recognize and to analyze allegorical representations in literature and in fine arts.

I hate voyages and explorers. -Claude Lévi-Strauss

While the planet did not come to an end with the wars, famines, holocausts, and atomic genocides of the 1930s and '40s, the world most certainly appeared shattered, newly vulnerable and precarious. At least this was the view broadly registered in France. Postwar reconstruction efforts served as opportunities — often of great urgency — for a reconceptualization and re-exploration of the world, of what a world or the world is, and of what or who constitutes and counts as part of the world. The world as such could no longer be taken for granted (as if it ever could be), and new explorations of the world and its meanings appeared throughout French expressive culture, letters, and public discourse. This seminar will study how artists, filmmakers, novelists, and philosophers took to exploration as a methodology for thinking, rethinking, and reinventing the world in an age of accelerated globalization.

Animal films reveal the cinema to us. -André Bazin

The essence of cinema becomes a story about animals. -Serge Daney

Even before the so-called "animal turn" in critical theory and the humanities more broadly, exemplified by Jacques Derrida's presentation of "L'animal que donc je suis" at Cerisy in 1997, moving image media, in practice and theory, has been deeply enmeshed in thinking with and about animals. From the animorphic paintings of creatures on the walls of the Lascaux caves to the role of animals as raw material for filmic emulsions, to the centrality of animal research to the development of the technologies and techniques of cinema (in the laboratories of Étienne-Jules Marey and other physiologists), to the fascination with animal life at the level of content, animals have been of primary concern for media. This joint French Literature and Film (JFF) seminar will examine key approaches to thinking about media through animals and animals through media, with special attention to the French and Francophone traditions of thought. Our enquiries will be organized around three key themes — animages (or animal images and questions of their epistemic and magical properties), animots (Derrida's term for animal-words and the enframing of animal life within anthropocentric representational systems, as well as broader inquiries into the animations of language, metaphor, and figuration), an animotions (or the forms of movement, emotion, and affect expressed by or invested in animals and media). Through these terms we will ask what media can teach us about animals (why and how we look at animals on screen, how we represent and understand animals, what lessons or pleasures we gain or hope to gain from watching them)? What can animal media reveal or teach us about any given medium and forms of mediation? What are the aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and political stakes of encounters between animals and media?

The course is to provide graduate students with a knowledge of the molecular entities involved in drug transport across biological cell membranes and to emphasize the physiological and clinical significance of these entities. The course will consist of didactic lectures presented in a traditional lecture format, and student presentations, when appropriate a lecture will be replaced by a research seminar.

This course combines a theoretical approach to computational linguistics (reflecting on the role computational methods can play in linguistic argumentation by discussing topical computational papers from various subfields of linguistics) with a practical one (learning how to develop and program computational methods to address linguistic research questions). Students will obtain hands-on experience with how data-driven computational methods are used in language science research.

This course develops the outcomes of JFL1107H. Students will get theoretically and practically acquainted with a breadth of contemporary computational methods in linguistics (such as word vectors, finite state machines, Gaussian mixture models, parsing algorithms, n-grams, textual association measures, and dimensionality reduction). These methods will be developed in relation to fundamental research topics across a broad range of subfields of linguistics and applied in depth to a specific topic selected by the instructor.

Whether it's the Alexa home virtual assistant, the graphic interface on a computer game, the partially automated (not to mention the self-driving) vehicle, the robotic arm in an assembly line, or the bot assistant on an online store, we have built a world of animated things. What does it mean to be human in a world of animated things? Art, religion, and philosophy have been exploring the interface between human life and animated things for thousands of years. Can we use artistic explorations to better understand human life in a world of technologically animated things?

In this course we will examine some aspects of this exploration, focusing on puppetry as a strategy and a solution to the problems of personhood. Puppets have always served as animated things that probe the limits of the human. And as soon as we talk about limits of the human, we are talking about how we imagine dehumanized bodies. 'The human' has held onto its particular status in the modern era, associated with privileges and rights. But as we are increasingly aware, the limits and mode of existence of this self-described human also defined those deemed 'not fully human,' including women, slaves, and animals. Mimetic traditions across human histories and geographies have in various ways posed questions about the limits of the human. Enquiries across philosophy, theology, anthropology, and aesthetics have raised challenges through which to confront assumptions about the limits of the human; and puppetry arts have been integral both to reinforcing and to challenging the assumptions about relations of power, and conceptions of thought and agency. The questions raised are integrally about labour (and who does it); and in such terms the robot — a kind of contemporary stand-in for the puppet — has increasingly been integral to such debates.

This is an experimental course that brings graduate students at the University of Toronto into dialogue with their peers at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. It is taught by colleagues at the two universities who share an interest in practical and theoretical problems associated with puppetry and the limits of the human. Our aim is to establish a dialogue to investigate a single practical and theoretical problem from the point of view of students and researchers living and working in two very different societies.

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.

The livelihoods of the rural poor in the Global South are closely connected to the environment. In this course, attention will be paid to the ways in which livelihoods are connected to the environment, but also to economic and political processes, in order to gain insight on their potential for poverty alleviation, sustainable resource use, and environmental change mitigation/adaptation. This course seeks to develop an understanding of livelihoods among the poor in developing countries, with a focus on how assets, social relations, and institutions shape livelihood opportunities in the present and into the future. The course will also explore emerging areas of inquiry in livelihoods research.

It was arguably the international avant-garde of the 1950s that first inspired wider exploration of the camera’s potential as a technology of the performative self. Since then, first-person filmmaking has gained ground, dovetailing with disparate social trends across the decades, including those of the New Wave, and more recently, resulting in feature-length autobiographical documentaries that circulate at festivals and garner commercial appeal. Using the German cultural context as case study within a comparative framework, this interdisciplinary seminar draws on diverse theories of subjectivity, including recent scholarship in performance studies (Goffman, Butler, Phelan), Lacanian psychoanalysis, documentary theory (Gaines, Nichols, Odin, Renov), phenomenology (Sobchak), post-structuralism (Barthes, Derrida, Foucault), and theories of cultural memory (Assmann, Halbwachs, Nora) and of transgenerational trauma (Caruth, Felman, Laub). We will explore how the subjective stance navigates a line between exhibitionistic display and introspective narcissism and, in the process, also blurs the lines between public event and private experience, between national historiography and subjective memory, between families of origin and the bounded self. Consideration will be given to both socio-historical context and continuing innovations in narrative form (confession, diary, testimonial), including the nesting of different technologies (photography, Super 8, home video, archival newsreel, cell phone). Our chronology will include avant-garde and feminist filmmaking of the 1970s, but focus primarily on productions of the past 15 years, including: investigative family films by (grand)children of both Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators, experimental queer cinema, reconstructed family historiographies of immigration to Germany, and mainstream features.

The purpose of the course is to historicize and theorize the concept of totalitarian culture by discussing traditional approaches of "totalitarianism" and more recent theories and histories in the context of various cultural manifestations of National-Socialist Germany and Stalinist Russia. A key theme of the course is the relation between propaganda, entertainment, and mass culture, in the context of how both Germany and Soviet Russia related to the Hollywood type of entertainment. The primary materials to be considered are American, German, and Soviet films of the 1930s and 1940s. Additional material includes diaries, memoirs, illustrative material on art and architecture, and scholarly works. The viewing and discussion of these films are integral parts of course requirements. Some of the films are available online; others will have to be watched at Media Commons.

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 century 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 century revolutionary movements and cultures and questions of gender outside of East Asia are very welcome to join the course.

This interdisciplinary course examines issues of identity, privacy and security from a range of technological, policy and scientific perspectives, highlighting the relationships, overlaps, tensions, tradeoffs and synergies between them. Based on a combination of public lectures, in-depth seminar discussions and group project work, it will study contemporary identity, privacy and security systems, practices and controversies, with such focal topics as biometric identification schemes, public key encryption infrastructure, privacy enhancing technologies, identity theft risks and protections, on-line fraud detection and prevention, and computer crime, varying between offerings. Seminars open to general attendance will be scheduled regularly during the first part of each lecture. The second part of the lecture will be restricted to students enrolled in the course.

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.

When they first encountered novelistic realism, writers all over the world felt it constituted an invitation to include in their writing distinctly non-literary elements of their own world in the form of descriptions and names of things and places. Realism encouraged a new kind of vision: writing about things that had never been written about in order to make people see those things for the first time. We will examine the meaning realism acquired as it made its way around the world by looking at three Western texts to suggest the history of realism — a novel by Balzac, another by Zola, and a third by Updike — and then at six more realist novels from other traditions, that is, from Africa, India, China, and Latin America. We will also look at representative theory of realism by Auerbach, Lukacs, Barthes, Ermarth, Jameson, etc.

In this course we will examine trickster tales across cultures. Societies the world over have known tricksters (Coyote, Hare, Brer Rabbit, Monkey, Tortoise, Fox, the snake, Ananse, Kagga, Hermes, Odysseus, young Jacob), but we cannot assume that all tricksters are alike or carry the same meaning. Trickster tales are particularly associated with nomadic or village societies, but also with colonial frontiers beyond the reach of the law. Monotheisms, empires, and post-Homeric epics have a great suspicion of tricksters, a mistrust often carried over into the realist novel. The defeat of the trickster is prominent in detective fiction and comic books. For the same reason, however, the trickster can also appear as a subversive postcolonial rebel. Yet capitalism itself always retains a special place for the trickster and his exploitation of the empathetic imagination. In short, the trickster has always been a focal point for questions about the function of trust in human relations.

This course will examine the intertextual movement of people from non-fiction (primarily history books and the news) to fiction. When do people who become characters in fiction keep their names? Migrants from history to fiction acquire interiorities and the characteristics that mark verisimilitude. When is such fictionalization permissible? Are there ethical constraints? When is the reader aware of the changes? How have the ethical and aesthetic rules changed in the last two decades? What difference does it make if the history and the fiction that people move between are postcolonial and not Western canonical? To understand the movement from history to fiction, we will compare it to a similar but not identical migration: of people from history books and the news to cinema, specifically to the biopic. In this migration names are more likely to remain the same but narrative events and their sequence are more likely to be changed. Film, it seems, has its own constraints, different from prose fiction's, that it must accommodate history to.

In Psychology of Language, we investigate human and other animal communication, structure of human language, word meaning and semantic memory, psychological studies of syntax, bilingualism, language and thought, language errors and disorders.

This course provides an intensive overview of the field of first language acquisition, covering issues of language development from birth to adolescence. Although the course focuses on the acquisition of emerging linguistic capabilities proper, the material covered provides an interdisciplinary perspective, and should be of interest to linguists, psychologists, speech pathologists, educators and parents. Topics to be addressed include the biological bases of language, the first words, and phonological, syntactic and semantic development. Social variables influencing development of language, bilingualism, models of language development as well as methods of data gathering and analysis will also be discussed.

Infants’ abilities at birth, prelinguistic development, the first words, phonological, syntactic and semantic development. Social variables influencing language acquisition, bilingualism, models of development, language play.

This course examines the development of theories of the novel in Europe and North America throughout the twentieth century. Why has the novel been such a central object of study for so many different theoretical traditions? What is at stake in these theoretical traditions that centre on the novel? Just as novel theorists historicize the novelistic form, we will historicize those theories, interrogating and deconstructing their conflicting assumptions. Organized chronologically and thematically, covering theorists from Russia, France, Central Europe, and North America, the course will include topics such as: the historicization of form; novelistic narrative; the search for masterplots and master narratives; time and space; the novel and the self; the place of the novel in theories of world literature; close reading and distant reading. Readings include Shklovsky, Tynianov, Bakhtin, Lukacs, Frye, Barthes, Robert, Girard, Genette, Booth, Brooks, Jameson, Miller, Moretti, Cohn, as well as Balzac, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Flaubert, and others.

1968 was a turbulent year of protest, revolution, and change that profoundly transformed philosophy, political thought, literature and cinema of the subsequent era. By focusing on certain historical flashpoints (such as the student protests and workers' strikes in France or the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia), 1968 will act as an anchor from which the course will explore the cultural and philosophical meanings of revolution, social justice, class, and alienation. Philosophical readings by Marcuse, Bourdieu, Badiou, and the Praxis school of Marxist thought (amongst others) will be accompanied by novels and films from Czechoslovakia, France, Poland, the Soviet Union, USA, and Yugoslavia. In addition, the course will focus on readings that engage with the cultural perception and historical narrativization of this year. Political changes over the decades — not least the end of state socialism in 1989 — have invariably affected the historical interpretation and memory of this crucial year, often marked by appropriation, erasure, and commodification. By looking beyond the year itself and seeking out its echoes, we will chart the shifting cultural meaning of protest and its impact on class, generational, gender, and race relations across national boundaries. Readings will be closely analyzed with an eye to the broader intellectual and historical contexts.

This course looks at how and why states seek to control culture and how creative projects may disrupt the action of political and commercial forces. The course begins by considering totalitarian regimes and cultural policy, along with examples of art labeled "healthy" or "degenerate" in Nazi Germany and the USSR. Case studies from the Soviet Union, the Eastern bloc, and post-Communist successor states illustrate how censorship, education and technology may be used to control cultural production and knowledge of the past. Seminar participants will look at the policy of Socialist Realism and consider official and unofficial art and literature to explore the potential for transforming culture into a site of resistance. Readings in theory of the archive will be used to support analysis of how nonconformist works complicate or subvert established views of the past and open new potentials for the future. The course will facilitate in-depth research of major examples of nonconformist poetry, art, fiction and archival projects from these countries and provide a basis for analysis of cultural resistance in other repressive contexts.

Readings include selections from Arendt and Lefort on totalitarian states, as well as analysis by Andrei Siniavskii, Katerina Clark, Igor Golomshtok, Boris Groys and Alexei Yurchak of official and unofficial literature and art. The course will engage theory of the archive with texts from Freud, Buchloh, Spieker and others.

This course, offered jointly through Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering, covers fundamental aspects of the formation, structure, and properties of natural materials, and the use of derived biological principles such as self-assembly to design synthetic materials for a variety of applications. Examples are drawn from both structural and functional biomaterials, with emphasis on hybrid systems in which protein-mineral interactions play a key role, such as mineralized tissues and biological adhesives. Additional materials with remarkable mechanical, optical, and surface properties will be discussed. Advanced experimental methods for characterizing interfacial biological structures will be highlighted, along with materials synthesis strategies, and structure-property relationships in both biological and engineered materials.

The objective of this course is to convey an appreciation of the sources, behaviour, fate, and effects of selected toxic compounds which may be present in the environment. Emphasis is on organic compounds, including hydrocarbons, halogenated hydrocarbons and pesticides. The approach will be to examine, for each compound, physical and chemical properties, sources, uses, mechanisms of release into the environment, major environmental pathways and fates (including atmospheric dispersion and deposition), movement in aquatic systems (including volatilization, incorporation into sediments, biodegradation, photolysis, sorption), movement in soils, and bioconcentration. Toxicology and analytical methodology will be described very briefly. Each student will undertake a detailed individual study of a specific toxic compound.

This course is designed to expose trainees to knowledge translation issues in the area of home and community care. Participants produce a quarterly digest for decisions makers involved in planning health service provision in the community. Participants select policy and program relevant research and translate it into an accessible format for decision makers. The course is designed to teach academic trainees how to disseminate research findings to a broad audience of policy decision makers. Over 70 international and Canadian journals from several disciplines are reviewed.

Objectives: to provide participants with critical appraisal and knowledge translation skills in the area of home and community care.

This course will emphasize the biochemical principles and mechanisms underlying the toxicity of drugs and foreign agents. In particular, the current hypotheses that explain the events at the molecular level which determine and affect toxicity are examined and critically evaluated. This course is suitable for graduate students of pharmacy, toxicology, pharmacology, biochemistry, environmental science, pathology, neuroscience, and medical biophysics. A weekly journal club will also be held after the lectures.