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

Course Syllabus
GEOG 4280 3.0 | Imagining Toronto
Department of Geography | York University
Fall Term 2007-08

Click here to download a printable version of the course syllabus.
Lecture slides and handouts may be downloaded here.

Instructor

Amy Lavender Harris, B.A. (Hons.), M.PL., M.IR.
Email: alharris@yorku.ca
Office hours: Wednesdays 3:00 to 4:00 pm, Ross S401

Time and Location

Wednesdays 4:00 to 7:00 pm
Vari Hall (VH) Room 2005

Course Description

This course 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 investigating 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/postmodernity dialectic, among ithers) precedes an exploration of topics incliding (1) constructing identity and place, (2) immigrant and natves: 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. [Source: Department of Geography Undergraduate Supplementary Calendar, 2007/2008.]

Course Website

http://www.imaginingtoronto.com
http://imaginingtoronto.blogspot.com [Imagining Toronto weblog, updated regularly]

Introduction

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 the Imagining Toronto course.

Evaluation

Grade Breakdown	Description	Due Date
10 %	Regular attendance and participation will be worth 10% of your course grade. Please note that attendance (taken weekly) will comprise part of your participation grade. Attendance is more than simply being present: it also involves actively attending to the discussions and contributing to the shared research program around which this course is organized.	ongoing evaluation
30 %	Short reflective pieces (3, worth 10% each)
	First reflective piece	October 3, 2007
	Second reflective piece	October 24, 2007
	Third reflective piece	November 7, 2007
20 %	Contribution to Toronto: The Novel	Ongoing; final contributions due November 21, 2007
40 %	Research paper (12 to 15 pages) The research paper will reflect your scholarly investigation of one or more themes, genres, places, periods or authors encountered during the course.	December 5, 2007
Total: 100 %
Late penalties: Late submissions will be subject to a penalty of 5% per day.

Course Readings

A package of photocopied course readings (literary excerpts, poetry and scholarly articles) will be available at the Scott Library and the Department of Geography resource library. You may make a single copy of this package for your personal use.

Additional materials needed to support your reading and research may be found at the York Library, the Toronto Public Library, in new and used bookstores, or online. A large electronic catalogue of Toronto literary and critical sources is listed in the Imagining Toronto library.

Schedule and Readings

Week	Date	Agenda and Readings	Work Due
1	September 5	Invitation and Welcome
2	September 12	Imagining Toronto: The City as Text Lee, Dennis, 1972 (reprinted 1994). Selection (pages 27-30) from Civil Elegies and Other Poems. Toronto: Anansi. Bridge, Gary and Sophie Watson, 2000. City Imaginaries. Chapter 1 in A Companion to the City, ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 7-17. Oxford: Blackwell. "Facts and Fiction: A roundtable discussion on Toronto literature with Sheila Heti, Andrew Pyper and Shyam Selvadurai." Toronto Life, August 2006. Electronically accessible at: http://www.torontolife.com/festures/facts-fiction/
3	September 19	Toronto's Literary Cartographies MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 1972. "House of the Whale" from Noman. Oberon. Ondaatje, Michael, 1987. Excerpts ("The Bridge" and "Palace of Purification") from In the Skin of a Lion. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Harris, Amy Lavender, 2006. Toronto's Tower of Babel. From The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto, ed. Alana WIlcox, Christina Palassio and Jonny Dovercourt, 162-167. Toronto: Coach House.
4	September 26	Possibilities of Dwelling: Home and Homelessness in Toronto Literature Bishop-Stall, Shaughnessy, 2004. Excerpt ("December") from Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown. Toronto: Random House. Govier, Katherine, 1985. "Brunswick Avenue" from Fables of Brunswick Avenue. Toronto: Penguin. Allen, John, 2001. Introduction from How the Other Half Lives: Representations of Homelessness in American Literature. PhD thesis. Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
5	October 3	Music from Elsewhere: Writing the Immigrant City Brand, Dionne, 2005. Excerpts (Chapters 1, 5, 12) from What We All Long For. Toronto: Knopf. Iyer, Pico, 2000. The Multiculture. From The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. New York: Knopf.	First reflective piece
6	October 10	The Age of Wisdom: Representing Youth and Maturity in Toronto Literature Hunter, Bernice Thurman, 1981. Excerpts ("The Annex" and "Kids' Day at the Ex") from That Scatterbrain Booky. Toronto: Scholastic. Atwood, Margaret, 1977. "The War in the Bathroom" from Dancing Girls and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Engel, Susan, 1999. Looking Backward: Representations of Childhood in Literary Work. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 33(1): 50-55.
7	October 17	The Labouring City: Narratives of Work Garner, Hugh, 1968. Excerpts (Chapters 3, 5, and 12) from Cabbagetown. Toronto: Ryerson. Hood, Hugh, [1962] 1977. "Recollections of the Works Department". From Toronto Short Stories, eds. Morris Wolfe and Douglas Daymond, 16-49. Toronto: Doubleday. Christopher, Renny and Carolyn Whitson, 1999. Toward a Theory of Working Class Literature. The NEA Higher Education Journal, Spring 1999, 77-81. Available electronically at http://www2.nea.org/he/heta99/s99p71.pdf
8	October 24	The Sexual City Atwood, Margaret, 1969. Excerpts (Chapters 28 and 29) from The Edible Woman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Jones, [Daniel], 1985. "Things That I Have Put Into My Asshole." From the brave never write poetry. Toronto: Coach House Press. Mort, Frank, 2000. The Sexual Geography of the City. In A Companion to the City, eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, 307-315. Oxford: Blackwell.	Second reflective piece
9	October 31	Urbia and Suburbia Berry, Michelle, 2005. Excerpts (pages 1-5) from Blind Crescent. Toronto: Penguin Canada. Young, Phyllis Brett, 1960 [reissued 2007]. Excerpts (Chapters 1 and 4) from The Torontonians. Toronto: Longmans [McGill-Queen's University Press.] Milton, Paul, 2005. Rewriting White Flight: Suburbia in Gerald Lynch's Troutstream and Joan Barfoot's Dancing in the Dark. In Downtown Canada: Writing Canadian Cities, ed. Justin D. Edwards and Douglas Ivison, 166-182.
10	November 7	Toronto the Wild Michael, Anne, 1996. Excerpt ("The Way Station") from Fugitive Pieces. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Michaels, Anne, 1999. "There is no City that does not Dream" from Skin Divers. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Mays, John Bentley, 1994. Binding and Loosing the Waters. From Emerald City: Toronto Visited. Toronto: Penguin/Viking.	Third reflective piece
11	November 14	Fantastic Toronto: Representing the City in Science Fiction, Fantasy, Noir & Genre Fiction (and film) Hopkinson, Nalo, 1998. Excerpts (Prologue, Chapters 1 and 2) from Brown Girl in the Ring. New York: Warner/Aspect. Wilson, Robert Charles, 2000. "The Inner Inner City" from The Perseids and Other Stories. New York: Tor. Raban, Jonathan, 1988. The Magical City. In Soft City. London: Collins Harvill.
12	November 21	Toronto: The Novel -- A Night of Readings and Performances Location to be determined.	Final contributions to Toronto: The Novel
13	November 28	Finale: Distilling the Imagined City MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 1987. "Sunlight at Sherbourne and Bloor." From Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
	December 5	Research paper due (Note: becasue this is the last date set by the Registrar's Office for the submission of fall term work, this date is not negotiable.)	Research paper due