Research Seminar on topics in Latin Poetry.

Research seminar focusing on the Latin literature of the Republican period.

This course is a research seminar focusing on the Latin poetry of Virgil.

Research seminar on topics in ancient philosophy.

This course is a research seminar focusing on Latin verse of the Imperial period.

Research seminar on historical topics focusing on the Greek world. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Research seminar on historical topics of the Republican or Imperial period. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Research seminar examining topics of Greek literature and culture. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Research seminar examining topics of Greek society from the Archaic to Hellenistic periods. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Research seminar examining topics of Roman literature and culture. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Research seminar examining topics of Roman society of the Republican or Hellenistic periods. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Research seminar on historical topics focusing on the Greek world. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Research seminar focusing on historiographical literature of the Graeco-Roman period. See departmental website for annual offering details.

This course is a research seminar focusing on historical topics of the Greek and Roman periods. See departmental website for annual offering details.

This course is a research seminar focusing on historical topics of the Greek and Roman periods. See departmental website for annual offering details.

This is a general introduction to comparative literature, and to contemporary theory and criticism. Its purpose is to offer all incoming MA and PhD 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.

In this course, students will complete a scholarly essay of approximately 8,000 words (the length of a publishable article in comparative literature), in consultation with a faculty member. Please consult with the unit for details and enrolment.

This is a self-driven reading course. Please consult with the unit for details and enrolment.

This is a course taught by a Northrop Frye Professor in Literary Theory, who is selected annually by the Centre for Comparative Literature.

After the completion of coursework, the next step for PhD students is the Field Paper and Exam. It is designed to prepare them for thesis writing. The Field Exam consists of three components: a Field Proposal, a Field Paper, and an Oral Field Exam

Bertolt Brecht played a specific role in the paradigm shift of the art which began at the end of the 19th century. He advanced this change by trying to connect art to its social and political functions and structure with the positive acceptance of the industrial revolution and by trying to transform it with the help of the new technological media.

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.

This course will explore how feminist theory has influenced the way medieval literature is read. The pluralistic and shifting nature of a feminist theoretical orientation which struggles with the politics of subject and gender identity, race, class, sexuality, and the body is particularly apt for the exploration of the medieval literary text whose instability and variability render it resistant to critical authority and open to multiple readings. We will attempt to understand how gender structures medieval thought and its literary expression through selective readings from a variety of feminist theoretical perspectives such as psychoanalytic theory, French feminism, and postmodern theory of the body. The main focus of the course, however, will be on opening up medieval literary texts to new meanings. Texts to be studied will be drawn from a wide crosssection of medieval literary discourses such as epic, romance, courtly lyric, fabliaux, Marian literature, hagiography, and drama and will include examples from writings by medieval women such as The Book of Margery Kempe, and Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies.

"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 "fictional" and "non-fictional" autobiographical 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 and to reflect on the use of paintings and photographs in their visualizations and articulations of selfhood. Marie-Claire Blais, Sophie Calle, Jacques Poulin, Michael Ondaatje, and Carol Shields 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 and photographic images (portraits and self-portraits), operate as visual supplements (illustrations) and corroboration (verification) of the autobiographical subjects and their narratives. The introduction of images (paintings, photographs, drawings) in autobiographical and fictional autobiographical texts problematizes the status of the autobiographical genre, referentiality, representation, the relationship between self-images and life-writings, etc. The study of theoretical texts pertaining to autobiography, painting, photography and the relationship between words and images will serve as a basis for our analysis of Blais, Calle, Ondaatje, Poulin, and Shields autobiographical and fictional narratives.

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.

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." Both the birthplace of consumer capitalism and the site of numerous failed revolutions, nineteenth-century Paris crystallized, for Benjamin (writing during the rise of European fascism) the numerous 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 nineteenth century visual, literary and architectural culture — fashion, photography, advertising, lighting, furniture, railways, exhibitions, department stores, catacombs, museums, etc. — 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.

This course will examine the dynamics of cultural exchange between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in medieval Iberia as manifested in the literatures produced by each group. Beginning with an introduction to theories of alterity and postcolonialism and their relevance to the medieval past, the course, through readings of Hebrew (in translation), Arabic (in translation) and Castilian literary sources will consider the way 'others' are represented, as well as the ways in which cultures come into contact in these texts through adaptation or hybrid literary forms. The course will move from Islamic Spain where cultural cross-fertilization produced such innovative, hybrid forms of poetry as the muwashshahat in Arabic with their accompanying Romance jarchas, and Jewish poets like Todros Abulafia who struggled to define himself and his writing within the dominant Arabic literary culture, to Christian Spain where the complex models of literary translation and transmission placed Arabic models at the centre of European intellectual culture. The course will follow the trajectory of Spanish history as Muslims and Jews were assimilated, converted or expelled by exploring the dynamics of conversion in poetry written by converted Jews in the 15th century and the domestication of the 'other' in such 16th-century Castilian texts as the Abencerraje. In addition to texts already mentioned, other readings may include Shem Tov’s Moral Proverbs, selections from the romances, and Juan Manuel’s El conde Lucanor. A reading knowledge of Spanish is required.

This course explores the cross-fertilization of cultures and literatures in medieval Iberia, a focus that is central to the mandate of Comparative Literature. The study of Hebrew, Arabic, Castilian and Latin literatures in the Spanish Middle Ages is more usually carried out in separate departments of Spanish, Near and Middle Eastern Studies, or Medieval Studies. The offering of this course through Comparative Literature enables a much fuller and richer exploration of medieval Iberian literary culture.

Translation Studies is a young field that has gained considerable momentum over the past 20 or so years (especially with the emergence of Postcolonial Studies). Comparatist by nature, translation is a good a gateway as any into the discipline of Comparative Literature and some of its principal concerns.

This course will combine the historical, theoretical and pragmatic dimension of translation (all of which overlap to a certain extent). On the historical side, there will be detailed and historically contextualized study of some main reflections on the problem of translation (including texts by Schleiermacher, Benjamin, Venuti, and Apter) as well as specific broader case studies of the translation history of certain works (including the Bible, Virgil, and Sophocles). For the theoretical dimension, Munday (2008) will serve as a guide to a critical discussion of particular approaches and models developed by current Translation Studies. The litmus test will be the pragmatic dimension: hands-on, detailed, and theoretically informed analyses of specific translations (usually short passages), mostly to be chosen and presented by the seminar participants themselves.

This course will look at six metropoles (Berlin, London, Paris, New York, St. Petersburg, Shanghai) from the perspectives of Japanese visitors such as Mori, Natsume, Nagai, Yokomitsu, Tanizaki, Gotô, Tawada, and Horie, and from those of natives and immigrants (e.g., Benjamin, Döblin, Nabokov, Woolf, Conrad, Rilke, Pushkin, Gogol, Shi). 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 sensations. 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., Apter, Atget, Benjamin, Brandt, Brassaï, Burgin, de Certeau, Doisneau, Gleber, Maeda, Ronis, Walker) shall define a conceptual framework for each session.