Time period: Modern/Contemporary. Geographic region: Western.

This seminar reads a series of contemporary novels and short stories by women authors in the context of current discussions and debates on intimacy and violence; misogyny; desire, fantasy, and the pornographic. The course will consider the ambiguity of desire and pleasure's contradictions; transgression and consent; rape; female friendship; sex talk; the stories of young women; and readership and audience. African-American, Indigenous, Canadian, Irish, Moroccan, and American authors will be read: Roxanne Gay, Kathleen Collins, Katherena Vermette, Miriam Toews, Eimear McBride, Leila Slimani, Diane Williams, Jamie Quatro, and Mary Gaitskill, amongst others. The focus will be on stories that are intentionally unsettling and operate without clear moral lessons. What is it that fiction can do, that non-fiction cannot, precisely when absent of general accusation, but instead is filled with detailed observations of the "inconsistencies and incoherence" of sex?

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 obsolescence imply for the practice of philosophy and for political practice? We'll look at the ways in which art, according to Hegel, stages its own undoing at every stage and in every art form (sculpture, painting, music, etc.), but especially in theatre, which Hegel presents both as the "highest" art form and the scene of art's ultimate undoing. Why does theater occupy this privileged position? And what comes next? We'll be focusing on selected portions of Hegel's Aesthetics and the Phenomenology of Spirit, alongside other contemporary writings, such as Lessing, Schelling, and Hölderlin. And we'll be reading some of the plays — mostly, but not always, tragedies — they were watching (or at least reading, or imagining watching): Sophocles, Euripides, Schiller, Goethe, Diderot, Aristophanes. And finally, we'll consider the peculiar afterlife of theatre in philosophy — as a scene of pedagogy, a performance, and a political spectacle.

Philosophy has always had a special interest in tragedy, and has often used it as either a negative or positive foil (sometimes both at once) to construct its own self-image. Plato famously banned tragedy; Aristotle recouped it; German idealist philosophers saw in "the tragic" a mirror-image of philosophy's own preoccupations; Nietzsche blamed philosophy for tragedy's demise; Marx saw in tragedy's own (tragic) slide into farce a symptom of practical-theoretical enervation.

In this semester we’ll explore the entanglement of philosophy and tragedy after Hegel, and in the light of the failed 1848 revolutions, with focused attention on how later thinkers raise the political stakes of this entanglement. We'll be exploring the links between tragedy and sovereignty; tragedy and revolution; tragedy and gender; the predicaments of decolonial tragedy; the relationship between genre and medium.

Readings to include: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit and Sophocles, Antigone; Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire; Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy; Brecht, Short Organon and selected plays; Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel and "What is Epic Theatre?"; Adorno, "Trying to Understand Endgame" and Beckett’s "Endgame"; Eisenstein's Notes towards his (unrealized) film version of Capital; C.L.R James, The Black Jacobins and his Toussaint Louverture (the play); Nicole Loraux, Mothers in Mourning; Judith Butler, Antigone's Claim; Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy.

"Poetics of Personhood" considers a problem raised several decades ago by Barbara Johnson, which remains understudied: what is the relationship between the poetic person and the legal person? Students in this course will examine theories of personhood, drawing on Enlightenment and liberal accounts by John Locke, John Stuart Mill, G.W.F. Hegel, and C.B. MacPherson; and critiques of personhood leveraged within the interdisciplines of critical race theory and Black studies by Sylvia Wynter, Cheryl I. Harris, Hortense Spillers, and Alexander Weheliye. Alongside these, we will read key texts on lyric poetry that consider the place of the person within this genre: selected critics will include John Emil Vincent, Jonathan Culler, Virginia Jackson, and others. The course will culminate with three case studies of poems drawn from different national/linguistic traditions: possible texts include Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip (Tobago/Canada), Freedom & Prostitution by Cassandra Troyan (US/Sweden), and Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil (India/UK).

Blood, both as subject and method, provides highly productive opportunities for reading the Caribbean. Blood, bloodlines, bloodshed, and bloodwork are indispensable as conceptual conduits through which to explore the complex histories and intricate cultural processes which constitute the Caribbean. Working with blood as the principal investigate strategy, this course will examine the pivotal role that questions of genealogy and violence occupy in the literatures of the English, French, and Spanish Caribbean. We will also study Caribbean literary responses to imperialist medical discourses and colonialist approaches to epidemiology which located the Caribbean of the nineteenth century as a pernicious site of disease, a locus of bad blood. Reading the Caribbean through blood invites comparative reflection on other societies within the global south whose literatures bear witness to similar histories of cultural or political violence. Additionally, this method facilitates reading connections between wider experiences of conflict and the restorative potential of cultural production. The course will focus on specific Caribbean histories, but it will also engage with a wide range of related fields such as memory studies, peace studies, trauma studies and the medical humanities. Alongside the main literary texts, we will read essays by scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Achille Mbembe, Hannah Arednt and Hortense Spillers. Key texts to be studied include Abeng, (Michelle Cliff), Sweet Diamond Dust (Roasario Ferré), The Book of Night Women (Marlon James), The Drifting of Spirits (Gisèle Pineau), Love, Anger, Madness (Marie Vieux-Chauvet) and Cecilia Valdés (Cirilo Villaverde) [trans. by Helen Lane].

This course combines questions and methods from book history and comparative literature to examine what happens to textual objects when they travel (or fail to travel) across geographical and temporal borders. Seizure and prohibition, fire, theft, bombing, and physical decay are among the factors that may threaten the life of books. How do publishing and self-publishing, distribution, collection and restoration in institutional, private or clandestine libraries reflect interests in cultural production, preservation, and transmission? What have people considered to be the books and texts worth saving and why?

We will take up B. Venkat Mani's challenge to abstract and cloistered concepts of world literature and examine as he does the life and death of the material text in concrete locations. This means critically interrogating what David Damrosch described as the "detached engagement" with world literature. It also entails nuancing broad claims by critics including Emily Apter and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak about power imbalances. We will look at the range of values and circumstances that influence the life of books in locations where war, disaster, authoritarian governments and regime change may impact what and how people read. We will develop our analytic toolkit by moving from Darnton’s communication circuit toward a socialized and material understanding of the text's lives and afterlives as outlined by scholars including Peter McDonald, Jerome McGann and D. F. McKenzie. We will consider examples such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the clandestine book trade in pre-revolutionary France, attempts to save books and manuscripts during WWII, literary censorship in South Africa, literature smuggled across Soviet borders and the restoration of damaged medieval manuscripts. Students will be encouraged to hone their analysis of material and social aspects of texts that interest them in light of questions about cultural production, transmission and preservation.

Over the last four decades, a growing body of literary works which specifically engage the aftermath of political conflict has been produced by writers from different societies across the globe. Emerging from the space of horror left by ethnic, religious, intra-state and /or border conflicts, these works highlight the significant role that literature can play in the negotiating of peace and resolution of conflict. In addition to participating in the process of attenuating conflict and building peace, post-conflict literatures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries become crucial in rebuilding filial, social, and communal relations. Significantly, post-conflict literatures also serve as conduits through which diasporic communities negotiate politics of identity and belonging with 'home' territories.

In this course we will study post-conflict narratives from Ireland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Darfur, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic and Colombia. Drawing on recent theoretical conceptions of conflict geography, biopolitics and necropolitics, we will examine issues such as religious and state violence, violations of human rights, trauma, genocide, and post-traumatic memory. But we will also be examining the therapeutic potential of imaginative literature as well as its role in facilitating processes of truth and reconciliation. Additionally, the course analyzes the variety of creative strategies employed by the different genres within post-conflict literatures (memoir, autobiography, autofiction, science fiction, crime drama) to make sense of the past and map a new future.

In exploring post-conflict literatures, we will draw on ideas from a wide range of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Achille Mbembe, Antonio Negri, and Sylvia Wynter, among others. The main texts for study will include Wendy Erskine Sweet Home (2019) [Ireland], Steven Galloway The Cellist of Sarajevo (2009) [Bosnia and Herzegovina — Canadian Author], Scholastique Mukasonga Our Lady of the Nile (2014) [Rwanda], Chinua Achebe There Was A Country (2013) [Nigeria], Evelio Roserio The Armies (2009) [Colombia] and René Philoctète Massacre River (2008) [Dominican Republic].

Why do humans engage in combat sports? And why was wrestling our first sport, followed quickly by boxing? Scholars of antiquity claim that this was to honour the gods. Experts on today's professional wrestling contend that it satisfies our need for melodrama. In this course, we will examine fighting's historical arc, asking ourselves why its delirious mixture of violence, competition, and sex has captured our imagination since the beginning of time. When ancient cultures made grappling their first sport, they aimed to stage and contain their most primitive urges: two people embraced aggressively yet did not try to kill or rape the other. The strangeness of this attracted observers and explains why wrestling to this day still draws crowds — and participants — from across humanity.

We will analyze historical artefacts, literature, and visual art — beginning with accounts of hand-to-hand combat among the world's major gods and heroes: Gilgamesh, Heracles, Odysseus, Krishna, and Muhammad. We will discuss Jacob's wrestling in the Bible, as well as Socrates, Plato, and the most famous protagonists of medieval literature: Beowulf and Siegfried. Even the Miller in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is known for his "wrastlynge." We will engage with indigenous traditions and African literature and study the female fighters who have subverted the masculinist stereotype: Atalanta, Palaistra (the Greek goddess of wrestling), the mighty Brunhild, and today's women's MMA and Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW). 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.

The Palliative, in medicine, is generally understood as that period of time after a person is no longer searching for medical interventions to extend life and before the patient dies. The question we will consider in this seminar is what radical possibilities can come between death and dying? However, we will not restrict ourselves to thinking about this question in terms of a human life, but extend the question to all forms of "endings" — other species, a language, a cultural form, a town, an economic system, a planet, a poem. We will consider what the palliation of everyday life might look and feel like and how might it function as a model for radical politics and art.

Many queer theorists have been asking similar questions, such as Jack Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure and Lee Edelman in No Future. In addition to this, Buddhist Philosophy also touches on this question of the formlessness of death. As does recent work in Afro-Pessimisms, such as Fred Moten's work that mobilizes the Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitaro.

In addition to these above-mentioned works in Queer Theory, Buddhism, and Japanese Philosophy students could expect to encounter current palliative and "end-of-life" debates within medicine. In terms of the aesthetic, novels, films, and other cultural works that specifically confront their own ends would also be assigned, such as Roberto Bolano's novels and films by JL Godard, who was a palliative artist par excellence in the way he repeatedly killed off his own works, not to mention the very field called cinema itself.

This seminar examines past and present interactions between the sciences and the theatre from two different yet complementary angles. The first analyzes how scientists continue to theatricalize themselves and their modes of inquiry in order to communicate with the societies around them. The second focuses on how 'science plays' (and operas) re-shape and respond to science and scientists: their methods, their value systems and their insights. We will also inquire to what extent strategies of theatricalization are necessary, especially when scientific results require broad societal consensus if they are to have any transformative impact (e.g., as regards climate change or matters of public health).

A wide range of periods and fields of knowledge will be visited. To mention but some: Foucault’s pendulum experiment; practices of autopsy; the discovery of DNA and its double-helix structure; the (very recent) discovery of gravitational waves; environmental sciences; and exploring implications of the growth of AI. Historical figures of interest will include Socrates, Galileo, Gaust, Oppenheimer, and Rosalind Franklin. Theatre works discussed will feature canonical plays and operas (e.g. by Aristophanes, Marlowe, Goethe, Brecht, Capek, Dürrenmatt, Glass, Adams, etc.) but also more recent work by Edson (W;T), Ziegler (Photograph 51), and Soutar (The Watershed). Outside researchers, including scientists, may be invited for select sessions.

This course will trace the emergence of World Literature as an integral subfield of contemporary literary studies, from the mid-20th century to the present. Contentiously depicted as either the antithesis or ideal of comparative scholarship, World Literature evokes less a singular approach than it does fecund questions concerning literary institutions, circulation, translation, and pedagogy. We will train a literary-sociological lens on the metropolitan production of World Literature while attending to new approaches that stress the latter's subjective constitution.

This course will acquaint graduate students with key debates in the study of World Literature. We will compare early models offered by Damrosch, Moretti, and Casanova with new work by Hayot, Beecroft, and others. How does a "literary ecology" differ from the "world republic of letters," and what intellectual commitments configure the world in terms of "significant geographies" rather than as one "literary world system"? We will work through such macro-concepts by foregrounding specific historical debates. We will, for example, reappraise the Ngugi-Achebe debate on the language of African literature through recent work by Jeyifo and Mukoma. Paraliterary institutions such as UNESCO and the university will form significant sites of inquiry as we turn to Brouillette, English, Huggan, Shapiro, and others. The question of translation and the pedagogical stakes of world literature will be brought into focus through Spivak, Venuti, and Apter. We will conclude this comprehensive overview by engaging the contemporary emergence of Global Englishes through scholarship by Anjaria, Joshi, Walkowitz, and Saxena. Students will leave this course acquainted with the full range of methods and debates shaping the study of World Literature today. They will also have developed a considerable appreciation of the long-term constitution of the field.

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, you 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) the sonnet, elegy, and pastoral poetry; 3) Euro-colonial and post-colonial contexts. Students will be selecting many of the poems to be studied in class, which may be written in languages other than English (accompanied by translations).

When the German-English writer, W.G. Sebald, began publishing in the late 1980s, readers reported never having read anything like him. What made his writing so unusual? Was it the unpredictable appearance of grainy photographs only tangentially related to the text? Was it the relentless blurring of fact and fiction, especially through autobiographical narrators, often named "Sebald"? Was it the flatly melancholic depiction of exile? Was it the mystery of genre: Were these autobiographies, novels, collages, travelogues? Or was it Sebald's paradoxical style: postmodern self-reflection portrayed in elaborate nineteenth-century sentences, including one that extends for over seven pages?

In this course, we will search for "Sebald," first by considering how his texts without apparent precursors indeed had them: the autofictions of Jorge Luis Borges, the periscopic monologues of Thomas Bernhard, and the photo-embedded stories of Alexander Kluge. We will then dive into Sebald's great prose fictions — Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz — examining his revolutionary style and the recurrent themes it describes: the unreliability of memory, the catastrophic history of humankind, and the conundrums of a non-Jewish German son of a Wehrmacht officer writing about the Shoah.

These themes touch on contemporary theoretical discourses surrounding trauma, war, post-memory, text-image, and autofiction. We will examine how these theories illuminate Sebald's and vice versa: how his fiction prefigures such conceptual "discoveries." By participating in own translations, Sebald likewise anticipates aspects of translation theory. At the end of the course, we consider Sebald's influence — following his early death in 2001 — on seminal contemporary writers such as Patrick Modiano, Rachel Cusk, and Jenny Erpenbeck.

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," examining texts such as Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital and Cara Daggett's The Birth of Energy. Next, we interrogate the political and cultural ideologies associated with extractivism and its implications for social and environmental justice, reading a novel such as Ursula LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest or Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. This leads us to analyze competing visions of energy transition and renewable futures, reading the After Oil books, looking at solarpunk, and analyzing infrastructure. Through interdisciplinary readings in theory, history, literature, and politics we will scrutinize how these discussions shape our understanding of democracy in the 21st century.

This course is intended to help students develop a creative and methodologically sophisticated research program in the field of clinical psychology. Topics to be covered include philosophy of science, consistencies and inconsistencies in behavior, methods of assessment, selection of participants, tasks and control groups in clinical research studies, external validity, the determination of clinical significance, taxometric methods, the analysis of mediational hypotheses, and the analysis of change.

This course will cover the data analytic tools in univariate and multivariate statistics. Students will learn correlation and regression, as well as obtain instruction on general linear modeling, multilevel modeling, and factor analysis. Students will be expected to complete an independent statistical project using SPSS.

This course will cover the fundamental concepts of latent variable modeling in order to make students better consumers and producers of such models in their research. Students will learn how to evaluate the quality of such models when applied to real data by understanding the various fit indices.

This course will provide students with an introduction to the principles of human neuropsychology. This includes an overview of brain-behaviour relationships and neuroanatomy, the effects of psychotropic drugs on the brain and cognition, neurological and neurobehavioural disorders, and the assessment and treatment of classic neuropsychological syndromes.

The goal of this course is to enhance students’ knowledge of the field of clinical neuropsychology - both research and application. Topics will span brain-behaviour relationships, and assessment and management of psychiatric, neurological, and medical disorders.

This course will provide students with a broad overview of the relationships between cognition, affect, and behavior. Topics to be covered include the role of insight in psychotherapeutic change and the role of mindfulness in relapse prevention.

This course will provide students with a broad overview of interpersonal psychology, from the early writings of Sullivan and Leary to the later writings of Keisler and Wiggins. Topics to be covered include the structure of interpersonal characteristics, the principles of interpersonal complementarity, and the role of interpersonal processes in psychopathological disturbance and psychotherapeutic change.

This course is intended to introduce students to the signs, symptoms, and syndromes of psychopathology and to the DSM-V diagnostic criteria for psychiatric disorders. The goal of the course is to provide students with the capacity to think critically about how various psychiatric disorders are conceptualized and to competently make differential diagnoses in both clinical and research settings.

This course is intended to introduce students to the adult assessment of personality and psychopathology. Topics to be covered include structured clinical interviewing, multi-scale self-report inventories, and performance-based (i.e., projective) measures. Students will become familiar with the administration, scoring, and interpretation of the measures that are commonly used in these domains and will practice integrating test results and writing assessment reports.

This course covers theoretical and applied topics in intelligence and cognitive assessment. Students will learn the history and theory underlying modern intelligence testing, acquire skills to administer and score intelligence tests, and be taught how to interpret the results of these test measures. The relationship of intelligence testing to the assessment of cognitive functioning will be discussed in the context of modern approaches to neuropsychological assessment. Students will also be trained in the administration of standardized cognitive test measures and learn how to interpret the results of these tests on the basis of neuropsychological theory and normative data in the context of various in class, in-vivo examinations that will require students to produce assessment reports.

This course is intended to introduce students to the prominent theories of psychological change (i.e., psychodynamic, cognitive/behavioural, humanist/existential) as well as to the empirical evidence of their efficacy. The role of the therapist, the patient, and the therapeutic alliance in producing positive outcomes will be examined.

This course covers fundamental skills required for clinical psychological interventions. Topics covered include risk assessment, history taking, case formulation, and treatment planning. Basic clinical skills such as empathic responding, active listening, the development and maintenance of the therapeutic alliance, and maintaining appropriate boundaries are explored through both didactic and experiential learning. Students have the opportunity to role play and participate in case simulations, allowing them to actively engage in skills acquisition. Ethical and legal issues in the provision of psychotherapy are also discussed, as is the role of socio-cultural factors in the therapeutic relationship. A practicum in psychological interventions (CPS1803H) is typically taken concurrently with this course.

This course focuses on the practical application of the material discussed in Foundational Skills in Psychological Interventions (CPS1802H). Students gain clinical intervention experience with selected clients under the clinical supervision of a qualified supervisor.

This course will provide students with a broad overview of psychopharmacology and the effects that various psychotropic drugs have on sensation, cognition, affect, and behaviour. Following an introduction to the principles of neuropsychopharmacology, the course will focus on the specificity and side effects of psychopharmacology and its role in the management of mood and neurocognitive disorders. This course is designed to introduce students to the pharmacological treatment of mood and neurocognitive disorders and also to provide part of the requisite training for prescribing privileges that are currently awarded to clinical psychologists in some jurisdictions.

As a complement to the survey provided in CPS 1801H Psychotherapy: Theories of Behaviour Change, this course will explore a more limited number of evidence based therapies in greater detail. A mix of didactic methods, including a blend of classroom instruction, videotaped therapy sessions, observation, modeling, feedback and supervised practice will be used. The psychotherapy taught in any given year will depend upon the availability of instructors and may include, but will not be limited to, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Interpersonal Psychotherapy, Emotion Focused Therapy, Brief Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, or Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy.

This course is intended to acquaint students with the ethics and standards of professional conduct, including the Canadian Psychological Association�s Canadian Code of Ethics for Psychologists and Practice Guidelines for Providers of Psychological Services as well as the relevant provincial and territorial codes of ethics and professional standards.