Course Listings for the Academic Year 2017-2018
Please note: students are responsible for insuring that your selected courses meet the program requirements stated in the Calendar. If, however, you feel that you need additional information or guidance please contact us.
Fall Courses
CLMD 6101T: Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory
Instructor: Paul Théberge
This course will address the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies of culture. Attention will be paid to those themes and issues in cultural theory of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that inform contemporary interdisciplinary work in literature, film, music, art and new media. This course is continued in the second semester.
CLMD 6103F/ ARTH 5210F: Issues of Cultural Mediation and Representation: Arts of the Great Lakes: Indigenous Heritage and the National Museum of Canada
Instructor: Ruth Phillips
This course brings students into the collections of the Canadian Museum of History to conduct individual research projects on historic items from the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and Wendat peoples of the Great Lakes. Students will be encouraged to explore Western and Indigenous theories of materiality, cultural biography, agency, survivance and translation in assessing the role of material and visual culture in wider historical processes of colonialism and Indigenous survivance. We will also discuss issues of voice and ethics that need to be considered when exhibiting items of Aboriginal heritage today.
CLMD 6106F/ARTH 5112F: Issues in History and Culture: Landscapes, Bodies and Cultural Memory Practice
Instructor: Jerzy Elzanowski
This seminar will reflect on the ‘physiology’ of historicized landscapes, mapping the articulation of human bodies and human remains at and through sites of conscience/trauma. The goal will be to think about how human bodies are interred in land and distributed throughout landscapes, and to consider how bodies and their representations foster both exclusionary and multidirectional cultural memory practices. We will address a diverse range of sources, including maps, photographs, exhibitions, and our own fieldwork, looking at both local and transnational contexts. The seminar will take a transdisciplinary approach, with emphasis on literature associated with memory studies and cultural landscapes, and include references to burgeoning discourses such as ‘architectural forensics’. We will draw on the subject matter and research experience of all participants as we work together to collaboratively and flexibly explore constellations of literatures and sources.
CLMD 6900T: Research and Professional Development
Instructor: Sarah Casteel
The primary goal of this year-long, workshop-based course for second-year doctoral students is to help students prepare for the second comprehensive examination and dissertation research. The class offers students a supportive space in which to workshop their second comprehensive examination lists and their preliminary dissertation proposals. Students work together to develop and exchange ideas about their teaching fields and dissertations with their peers and to benefit from constructive criticism. Be prepared to engage with other students’ scholarship fully and constructively as we discuss, develop and refine plans for future research.
The second major goal of the course is to foster practical skills and knowledge necessary for academic and professional success at the doctoral level and beyond. The course helps students to master various aspects of the academic profession including: writing OGS and SSHRC plans of study, becoming acquainted with library resources, academic publishing, conference paper presentations, research ethics and other professional concerns. Further topics will be introduced in response to student need. This course is continued in the second semester.
CLMD 6903F/ENGL 5002F: The Humanitarian Apparatus: Feeling Good, Between Post-Truth and Other Fictions
Instructor: Stuart J. Murray
This course addresses the rhetorics of humanitarianism, and the ways that humanitarian “feelings”—the feel-good desire to address, redress, or alleviate human suffering—are fostered and mobilized as biopolitical forms of governance, the means by which the biopolitical State increasingly manages and regulates the lives of populations, both at home and abroad. Where should we place literature and literary tropes in the context of humanitarianism and biopolitics? Are the feelings inspired by literature complicit with wider systems of injustice, or might they offer critical tools? How might these feelings be distinguished from a politics of post-truth, and the feel-good “truthiness” of the lie? Situated firmly in our contemporary moment, and reading a selection of literary texts and theory, I hope to explore a distinctly rhetorical understanding of the ways that humanitarian feelings underpin contemporary politics, lending it a moral raison d’être. Can we account rhetorically for what Didier Fassin calls “humanitarian reason,” a sort of onto-logic that has come to be taken for granted, and that organizes political—and sometimes violent—State interventions under the aegis of humanitarianism and in the name of life itself? As Fassin notes, humanitarianism is a biopolitics “in that it takes as its object the saving of individuals, which presupposes not only risking others but also making a selection of which existences it is possible or legitimate to save.” Humanitarian feelings, then, are at the very heart of decisions over who will be made to live and who will be allowed to die. Warning: This course might not make you “feel good.”
CLMD 6105F/ARCH 5301 / 6001:
Instructor: Stephen Fai
This will be updated as soon as it becomes available.
Winter Courses
CLMD 6101T: Perspectives on Interdisciplinarity in Cultural Theory
Instructor: Daniel McNeil
This course is a continuation of CLMD 6101 in the first semester. This course will address the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies of culture. Attention will be paid to those themes and issues in cultural theory of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that inform contemporary interdisciplinary work in literature, film, music, art and new media.
CLMD 6102W/ENGL 5004W: “Holocaust Representation and Global Memory”
Instructor: Sarah Casteel
Is there such as thing as “global Holocaust memory”? How and why does Holocaust memory circulate across national and cultural borders? How do memories of the Holocaust interact or compete with those of other historical traumas (African slavery, the genocide of Indigenous peoples) and how has Holocaust memory been reanimated in the service of other political projects? Why did the Holocaust serve as a catalyst to the emergence of memory studies in the late 20th century and to more recent transnational and transcultural directions in the field?
In this course we will begin by discussing classic theorizations of the Holocaust and its relationship to cultural and aesthetic representation, engaging with canonical works of Holocaust literature and art. We will then consider the global circulation or “cosmopolitanization” of Holocaust memory through an analysis of literary and visual texts that bring the Holocaust into conversation with colonial histories of trauma, raising thorny issues about uniqueness, comparison and claims to universality. Over the course of the term, we will examine a variety of forms of memory, including: multidirectional, competitive, visual, prosthetic, postmemory, and countermemory. We will give particular attention to the intersection between media and cultural memory and to the role of text and image in mediating, preserving or erasing memories of atrocity.
In order to further develop our discussion of the comparative and global dimensions of Holocaust memory, in the final two weeks of the course, students will present case studies that explore the relevance of the theorizations of memory we have studied to the particular genres, media, and cultural histories that drive their own research interests.
CLMD 6104W/LAWS 5903: Issues of Subjectivity and Difference: Law, Culture and Dissent
Instructor: Philip Kaisary
To dissent is to disagree and be at variance: to refuse an established order, to diverge from orthodoxy, to oppose, critique, quarrel or resist. Contiguous with dissent is the demand for revolutionary transformation. Drawing on a diverse corpus of legal-political and literary-cultural materials including film, this course will examine how dissent has been facilitated and energized, suppressed and silenced, and represented and understood from Ancient Greece to Che Guevara to our contemporary moment. Our methodological approach will be comparative, contextual, and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from multiple sub-fields including critical theory and critical legal studies, postcolonial studies, and the law, culture, and humanities movement
CLMD 6105B &BW/FILM 5002: Issues in the Technologies of Culture: Media and Emotion
Instructor: Aubrey Anable
This graduate seminar will consider the ways that emotion figures in theoretical and historical accounts of film and related audio-visual technologies. Questions about emotion and “affect” are at the root of contemporary debates about identity, subjectivity, politics, and representation. Yet, the body—its sensual capacities and vulnerabilities—is often figured as that which media technologies and those who study them must overcome or entirely deny. Our primary concern will be tracing this intellectual history and the ways contemporary media culture and recent theoretical shifts reframe the relationship between media and emotion. We will use screenings and readings as materials to think (and feel) with.
Many of the readings for the course will cover the contemporary “affective turn” in theory, its debates, and its critics. To the degree that aesthetic philosophy is grounded in the question of emotion, we will also consider earlier accounts of sensation, perception, and interpretation. Recent related developments in theory, such as post-humanism, new materialism, and surface reading, will also be brought to bear on our screenings, readings, and discussions.
CLMD 6900: “Interdisciplinary Research Methods”
Instructor: Sarah Casteel
This course is a continuation of CLMD 6101 in the first semester.
The primary goal of this year-long, workshop-based course for second-year doctoral students is to help students prepare for the second comprehensive examination and dissertation research. The class offers students a supportive space in which to workshop their second comprehensive examination lists and their preliminary dissertation proposals. Students work together to develop and exchange ideas about their teaching fields and dissertations with their peers and to benefit from constructive criticism. Be prepared to engage with other students’ scholarship fully and constructively as we discuss, develop and refine plans for future research.
The second major goal of the course is to foster practical skills and knowledge necessary for academic and professional success at the doctoral level and beyond. The course helps students to master various aspects of the academic profession including: writing OGS and SSHRC plans of study, becoming acquainted with library resources, academic publishing, conference paper presentations, research ethics and other professional concerns. Further topics will be introduced in response to student need.