IMAGINING TORONTO
Intersections of Literature and Place in the Toronto Region

Welcome to the Imagining Toronto project.

Updated 6 April 2008

The Imagining Toronto project explores intersections of literature and place in the Toronto region. Use the navigation bars (above) or click to view the Imagining Toronto Library, the Imagining Toronto course website, and the Imagining Toronto project's blog.

Imagining Toronto, a book exploring how culture and space are negotiated through the city's literature, will be published by Mansfield Press in the fall of 2008.

If you would like to know more about the Imagining Toronto project, please contact Amy Lavender Harris at alharris@yorku.ca.

Why Imagining Toronto?

Whole words come alive at the intersection of literature and place. They exist in districts so familiar to us that we don’t even notice them, regions simultaneously so strange that we can hardly conceive them. In the iconic Toronto novel, In the Skin of a Lion (McClelland & Stewart, 1987), Michael Ondaatje writes that

[b]efore the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

In Soft City (Hamish Hamilton, 1974) Jonathan Raban observes,

[t]he city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps.

Robert Fulford calls Toronto an "accidental city", in the sense that many of its most meaningful and iconic places -- the CN Tower, Chinatown, and the Toronto Islands among them -- have emerged as happy accidents; the unintended consequences of city planning, commerce, demographics, and natural processes. He writes,

A successful city fulfills itself not by master plans but through an attentiveness to the processes that have created it and an awareness of its possibilities. It achieves a heightened identity by giving form to memory and providing space for new life. (Accidental City, 1995: 14)

In Emerald City: Toronto Visted , John Bentley Mays writes of the city dweller's need to discover 'urban thinking places' and adds that

living fully and mindfully anyplace, I believe, involves giving thought to all the rhythms we move within -- the personal ones, from birth to death, but also the historical ones, preserved and recalled by the artifacts of architecture and urban planning, art and writing and music. (1994: 2; 27)

These commentaries suggest that the cities we live in are the products not primarily of brick and mortar (or bureaucracy and money) but instead are the invention of our memories and imaginations. In other words, our cities unfold not only in the building but in the telling of them.

And yet, there is the question of how and whether a Toronto-based urban literature might supplant a century and more of writing fixated on the rural and wild spaces of Canada, in a country where the very existence of urban spaces is so often conceived as an invasion and a blight on what is romantically remembered as a pristine and natural landscape. There is the additional problem of how and whether such a literature can adequately capture the complex flows, crises, and assertions of a moving metropolis. In Downtown Canada, Douglas Ivison and Justin Edwards comment on the importance of shifting focus to "that most placeless of places, the city" while also "reasserting the local in an increasingly globalized Canadian literature." (2005: 6) Finally, and perhaps most urgently, there is the difficulty of determining whether such a literature exists at all.

Opinion on this last question is decidedly mixed. In an essay published in uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto (Coach House, 2005), Toronto journalist Bert Archer claims that Toronto is "a city that exists in no one's imagination, neither in Toronto, nor in the rest of the world." He adds, "Toronto is a place people live, not a place where things happen, or, at least, not where the sorts of things happen that forge a place for the city in the imagination." (220) In contrast, in a 2005 Vanity Fair article the American critic Anderson Tepper avers that since the 1987 publication of Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, "a vision of modern Toronto gradually took shape before our eyes." The article quotes Toronto novelist and poet Dionne Brand's comment that "the literature is still catching up with the city, with its new stories." Writing in the Globe & Mail, Stephen Marche describes Toronto's "flourishing bookishness" almost breathlessly, asserting that "Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time." Yet, Marche describes both the city and its fiction as "insular" and focused on "interior rather than public spaces." Toronto writer Andrew Pyper echoes this sentiment in a 2006 literary roundtable organized by Toronto Life editor Mark Pupo (“Facts and Fiction”, August 2006), commenting, “I think there’s a reluctance in our fiction to engage Toronto directly as a place.”

One important purpose of Imagining Toronto is to challenge all of these viewpoints. It has been a very long time since Toronto first clawed its way out of its literal or literary woods. To claim (as both Archer and Tepper do) that Toronto literature begins or ends with Ondaatje's novel is to exhibit a remarkable (although hardly uncommon) lack of familiarity with the city's sizable and expanding literature. Marche's description of Toronto as "unimaginative to the extreme" is as perplexing and narrow as the short list of literary works he grudgingly attributes to Toronto writers. Brand's comment seems to be the only one that offers much hope for a Toronto literature. Indeed, catching up with a city's stories is any urban literature's greatest challenge and its greatest opportunity, and it is objective that drives that Imagining Toronto project.

To view the Imagining Toronto library (an expanding collection of Toronto-focused literary works including novels, poetry, stories, and plays dating to the 1780s) click here.