A few First-Year Seminars give preference during the first round of enrolment to students with membership in the college offering the course - if this is the case, the college name will be listed beside the course title. During the second round of enrolment, first-year students at any college may enroll if space is available.
CCR 199Y1Y: Creative and Cultural Representations (1)
CCR 199Y1 Creative and Cultural Representations: Category 1
CCR 199Y1Y
Section L0031
Victoria College Course
Timetable
Seeing and Believing: Patterns of Visual Communication
This course examines forms of visual communication and perception from the Medieval to the modern periods. The focus is not on art, but on pictures and their patrons, as well as on their recipients or consumers. Yet another perspective is added by the academic discipline that invented the tools that serve to scrutinize these phenomena: the History of Art. Believing by means of seeing pictures, or believing – as a vital prerequisite to understand the pictures' message – are complex issues through time. It will become apparent that in most cases pictures could not and cannot be understood entirely by themselves, but only jointly with written or oral sources and traditions. Pictures are definitely contextual; they depend on and reflect a changing society. The seminar will disclose some of these mechanisms and historical structures concerning the conception and contextual understanding of pictures while choosing some paradigmatic examples from Medieval to modern times.
Instructor: J. Wollesen, Victoria College
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations
CCR199Y1Y
Section L0041
Trinity College Course
Timetable
Raiders, Traders, and Invaders: the Vikings and Their Descendents
Views on the Vikings are as mixed today as they were throughout the medieval period, and it can be hard to find an unbiased perspective: the Vikings themselves left few contemporary written records, and the reliability of oral accounts allegedly transmitted across many centuries is open to question. By contrast, the Vikings' victims were often literate and often Christian, and sought to depict their attackers as instruments of diabolical wrath. What is clear is that the Vikings used their swift and efficient ships to penetrate almost every corner of the then-known world, and indeed to push the boundaries further, heading East deep into Russia, South into the Mediterranean and to Byzantium and beyond, and West as successive settlers of Iceland, Greenland, and (for a time) North America. Moreover the descendants of the Vikings had a deep impact in many lands, not least in England (where they seized the crown), in Normandy (where they seized power and branched out again to conquer England), and in the expanded Scandinavian homelands of Denmark, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden where they still remain. This course will cover aspects of the histories, cultures, languages, and literatures of these remarkable peoples across more than a millennium.
Instructor: A. Orchard, Trinity College and Centre for Medieval Studies
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations
CCR 199Y1
Section L0019
Victoria College Course
Timetable
Reading and Writing Poetry
This course aims to contribute to the next generation of readers and writers of poetry, by making the experience of poetry as compelling and as eclectic as possible. We will be reading, discussing, writing, and exchanging poems in a stimulating but relaxed atmosphere designed to combine the free creative expression of a workshop approach with the breadth of input available through university study. We will build on the students' previous acquaintance with poetry and its means of expression (often drawn from non-literary areas such as popular music, photography, and cinema), and we will open up new possibilities by reading and discussing a broad range of mostly contemporary poetry and poetics. Class discussion will arise both from focus-questions directed to assigned readings and from work-shopping one another's creative efforts. Although an introductory text on the workings of poetry will be used as a common resource, the main emphasis will be on learning by doing - becoming more sophisticated readers and writers of poetry by reading and responding creatively to the wealth of poetic resources available in our culture and our community. In addition to reading such contemporary Canadian poets as Don McKay, Dennis Lee, Sue Sinclair, and Matt Robinson, and such European and Latin American poets (in translation) as Yves Bonnefoy, Tomas Transtromer, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, and Luis Borges, we will take advantage of the flourishing city poetry scene and attend some of the many live poetry readings in Toronto. Students will be expected to read, look, and listen widely, to write freely, and to give their most enlightened and helpful attention to one another's works.
Instructor: J. Reibetanz, Victoria College
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations
CCR 199Y1Y
Section L0221
Trinity College Course
Timetable
More Than Just a Dinner Party: High Style and Serious Attitude in the Literary Salon of 1830s Paris.
Money, Love, Heroism, the Occult, War, Revolution, Royalism and Opium; such were the variety of subjects explored in a literary salon in Paris around the year 1830. In an age of uncertainty (the Napoleonic Age over, the restored Monarchy faltering under a mad king), a generation of writers, artists and musicians were searching for meaning. Several met regularly in the elegant drawing room of the Arsenal library in Paris, creating what is called a salon. Along with exquisite food, music and dance, they took a steady diet of wit, debate, humour and passion. We will explore their works as well as the literature, music and art of those who inspired them. Victor Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal, a young Franz Liszt, the artists Delacroix and David d'Angers all had attended. Finding inspiration in Byron's poetry, Hoffmann's tales, Goethe's and Scott's legendary works and the music of Berlioz and Chopin, their ideas about artistic style and conviction have influenced Western culture to this day. Readings are in English or English translation.
Instructor: B. Ferguson, Trinity College and French
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations
CCR 199Y1Y
Section L0271
Timetable
"The Fine Art of Murder: Reading Detective Fiction"
Since its inception in the Nineteenth century, detective fiction has been one of the most popular literary genres, immediately recognizable in spite of the many changes it has undergone. While Sherlock Holmes, with his scientific approach to investigation, remains one of its most enduring archetypes, he has little in common with the morally complex private eyes of the "noir," with the cops of the procedural novel, or with the socially engaged sleuths of feminist mysteries, to name just a few permutations of the figure of the detective. This course will explore the many faces of detective fiction, addressing questions such as: Why does crime hold such a fascination for modern audiences? What kind of pleasure do we derive from reading stories that often follow established conventions and rules? What do these novels about crime and punishment tell us about broader social and political issues?
Instructor: L. Somigli, Italian Studies
Breadth Category: 1, Creative and Cultural Respresentations
CCR 199Y1Y
Section L0272
Timetable
Sorrows and Joys of the Immigrant Experience and the Myth of America
This course will examine the way North America was seen by Italians in the first half of the twentieth century and the living conditions that led entire villages to seek their fortunes in the New World. It will also examine the economic and psychological difficulties the new Italo-Canadian immigrants experienced in a search for a new home and a new identity. In the first term the image of America will be studied through the novels and films of Italian writers of the thirties and forties who projected both positive and negative feelings on it (Vittorini, Carlo Levi, Silone, Pavese). The new country was seen as a land of freedom, opportunity and economic growth, with a strong and vibrant culture, but also as the home of crass capitalism, shameless profiteering, economic inequality and ethnic discrimination. In the second term the novels and poetry of Nino Ricci, Gianna Patriarca, Mary di Michele and other contemporary Italo-Canadian writers will be studied to examine the feelings of nostalgia, isolation and difficulty in adapting to Canadian culture they and other immigrants experienced, as well as their successes and triumphs in the new country. All readings and films will be in English or with subtitles.
Instructor: G. Katz, Italian Studies
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations
CCR 199Y1Y
Section L0273
Timetable
Classics of the Italian Cinema: Obsession, Passion, Dreams and Death
Forbidden loves for unattainable men and women. Melodramatic stories of love and death, Sensual and dangerous femmes fatales who destroy the men they attract and angelic women who save them. This is the stuff of Italian opera which appears in various guises throughout Italian cinema, even when the films reproduce everyday reality. In this course we will examine how Italy's most important directors have dealt with these burning themes. We will go from Visconti's melodramatic films where love is destructive and brings inevitable death (including Ossessione, Senso, Death in Venice), to Antonioni's frozen passions in an alienated world (including Il grido, Blow up) to Fellini's humourous view of the world (including The White Sheik and 8 ½). We will also look at the way De Santis, Bertolucci, Wertmuller, Pasolini and Scola combine tales of love with political messages, using realistic stories, myth and satire. We will read some novels on which the movies are based. All course material is in English or with English subtitles.
Students will be able to view the movies either during a set class time, or independently at the Audiovisual Library (Robarts, 3rd floor), or by renting them from a video store. Most movies shown are available in the AVL library.
Instructor: G. Katz, Italian Studies
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations
CCR 199Y1Y
Section L0274
Timetable
Italian Tales from the Age of Shakespeare
Storytelling was born with man himself. It is one of the most basic activities in which humans engage for leisure. In the early modern era, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) was the first to elevate storytelling to an art form in his masterpiece, the Decameron. This course will start with a selection from Boccaccio's one hundred tales and continue with their many reincarnations in the 15th and 16th centuries, in order to explore the dawn of the modern era – the Renaissance – a period known for its many geniuses (Leonardo Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Michelangelo, to name but a few) who elaborated a vision of humankind that is central to the West to this day. Students will learn from the protagonists of that age, in a literary form that was suited better than others to depict reality, how Renaissance men and women felt about love, sex, and death, marriage and family, religion, the Church, and other political institutions. In all cases, the stories will be selected either because they are famous in and of themselves or because in subsequent centuries the tales were re-elaborated by more powerful imaginations (Shakespeare, for instance).
Instructor: M. Scarci, Italian Studies
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations
CCR 199Y1Y
Section L0331
Woodsworth College Course
Timetable
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in Her Time and Ours
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's 1813 novel about spirited Elizabeth Bennett and forbidding Mr. Darcy, is the central focus of this seminar. Admired by both critics and readers since its publication, Pride and Prejudice rewards study both for its own sake, a model of English prose fiction and a revealing image of England on the threshold of modernity, and for what its contemporary popularity reveals about our time, which has witnessed an outpouring of retellings and adaptations of the novel since a highly successful 1995 BBC television production starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. The seminar has two principal goals: to appreciate Austen's fiction in historical context and to consider whether or not Austen's original vision survives in contemporary versions of her story. Works studied will include Pride and Prejudice, a number of film and television versions of the novel, two other novels by Austen, and one or more modern novels and films based on Pride and Prejudice, including Bridget Jones's Diary.
Instructor: T. Moritz, Woodsworth College
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations
CCR 199Y1Y
Section L0332
Woodsworth College Course
Timetable
Fatal Attraction: The Lure of the Villain in Literature
Why is it that literary villains and vampires such as Satan, Iago, Heathcliff, Dexter, and Dracula get all the best lines? Villains and vampires are usually intelligent, devious, scheming, and nefarious, often eloquent or even charismatic. The defining characteristic of many of these characters is that they know they are villains and are often proud of it, yet as Tillyard comments "to be greatly bad, a man [or woman] must have correspondingly great potentialities for good." Villains and vampires are not only compelling as fictional characters, but their wrongdoings often begin and drive the plot. In this course, we will examine some remarkable villains and vampires, including some female characters, selected from literature. After identifying some archetypal characters and themes, students will observe how villains have been reshaped over the centuries and what role women play in the villainous impulse. Films will be integrated with written texts where appropriate. This seminar will assist students develop skills in critical reading and thinking, academic writing, and seminar presentations. Evaluation will be based on reading response entries and final analysis assignment, two in-class identification tests, one group presentation, and class participation.
Instructor: J. B. Rose, Woodsworth College
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations
CCR 199Y1Y
Section L0401
Cancelled
Dying of Love: Violent Constructs of Love and Gender
The preoccupation with love and sexuality has dominated Western European thought in fictional and non-fictional – philosophical, medical and theological – texts from classical antiquity to the present. Love has been presented in the history of Western culture in contrasting ways, as a passion that can be sublimated into culturally valued pursuits; as a way of relating to God, or as suffering that undermines reason and leads to sickness. This course will focus on gender power relations and on the political dimensions of love. It will explore love as a violent social construct that often leads to justifying sexual and psychological violence in real-life sentimental relationships. We will examine fictional and/or theoretical texts from classical antiquity, medieval, early modern and modern period, including expressions of contemporary Western popular culture. All readings are in English. Students will be invited to bring their own textual examples (visual or written) to complement the syllabus.
Instructor: S. Munjic, Spanish and Portuguese
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations
CCR 199Y1Y
Section L0402
Timetable
Autobiography and the Making of the Self in Western Culture
From talk shows to reality television, from social networks to psychoanalysis, narrations of the self are everywhere in our culture. We see them as offering the truest and most direct access to our being. The concept of an inner self as the ultimate place of the "real me" and a space of freedom from social encroachments is deeply ingrained in Western culture, and would seem to be one of the unchanging truths about human nature. However, this notion is the product of historical, social, and cultural change.
Through the study of autobiographical and pseudo-autobiographical books, movies, and graphic novels, this course will examine different ways of constructing the self from Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, and up to the 21st century. Some issues to be treated include the definition of autobiography as a genre, how writing is used to create the self, and how the fictional mechanisms help create the illusion of reality. Finally, the course will discuss the role that social and political contexts play in the articulation of various identities (gender, class, race, etc.) in the creation of this most personal document
Instructor: I. Fernandez-Pelaez, Spanish and Portuguese
Breadth category: 1 Creative and Cultural Representations