Imagining Toronto | Intersections of Literature and Place in the Toronto Region

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About the Imagining Toronto Course

Imagining Toronto explores intersections of literature and place in the Toronto region, exposing students to critical and imaginative works on place, culture, and representation. Close readings of a wide selection of Toronto-based literature (fiction, poetry, non-fiction) are paired with critical scholarly works interrogating how places are invented, (re)presented, and (re)produced. The course is arranged thematically. An introduction to concepts and theories in literary/cultural geography (including representations of place, literary regionalism, issues raised by the modernity/post-modernity dialectic, among others) precedes an exploration of topics including (1) constructing identity and place, (2) immigrants and natives / selves and others, (3) transformations of nature into culture, (4) sexualities and the city, (5) the possibilities and impossibilities of dwelling in the city, and (6) urbia and suburbia.

Through engagement with seminars, workshops, guest speakers, and field trips, and through their own (short) imaginative and (longer) critical essays, students will explore Toronto's visible and subterranean layers. Toronto is a city built upon buried streams and half-culverted ravines that periodically roil up and swallow cars and concrete. Toronto's shore is a filled-in lakebed periodically disgorging the remains of sunken trawlers. It is a city built upon its own detritus -- brickyards, landfills, and Huron villages -- revealing that present-day Toronto is only the tip of the tel. Toronto is not only physically but culturally liminal. The broad aim of Imagining Toronto is to discover and explore Toronto's liminal and literary character, and in doing so, to make a place for both ourselves and our literature in this city. Welcome aboard!