Faculty members of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto represent many disciplines, departments and areas of research. From the classical literatures through medieval to modern and post-modern texts, aboriginal and oral traditions, the courses offered in the Centre span the centuries combining theory and practice in flexible programs that allow each student to pursue innovative research in a vast range of subjects and methodologies. In addition to the Faculty interests listed below, the Centre for Comparative Literature also draws, when appropriate, upon other departments and centres in the humanities and social sciences for expert collaboration in unusual and highly specialized fields of research.
Veronica Ambros
Professor of Comparative Literature and Slavic
My research includes the theories of the Prague linguistic circle, their precursors, the Russian formalists, and their successors, most prominently the Tartu School around Yuri Lotman. The conference Structuralism(s) Today: Paris, Prague, Tartu, organized by the Center, as well as the eponymous volume published in 2009, confirm these theorists' relevance and versatility. My main subject of inquiry, however, is semiotics in general and the semiotics of drama and theater in particular. Another part of my research is connected with the cityscape of Prague as a place that used to be an important center of German as well as Czech literature and Russian émigré culture. Prague serves as a base to explore the relationship between urban space and fiction, between multiculturalism and nationalism, between center and margins. Imaginary Prague, as it appears also on stage and screen, informs my exploration of the functions of intermediality, especially of the relationship between fine arts, cinema, and theater. [more info.] email
Ruoyun Bai
Professor of Comparative Literature and Chinese Literature and Culture
A highly dynamic, contradiction-ridden Chinese popular culture is emerging from a rapidly evolving media system, new media technologies, and global as well as regional flows of news and entertainment. Whereas the Chinese state used to employ mass culture to produce subjects, now it turns itself, and finds itself being turned, into a cultural commodity for its subjects’ consumption. A fascinating question that drives my research agenda is: how is the state, including its agents and agencies, re-produced and consumed in Chinese popular culture and what are the cultural and political implications? For example, how do anticorruption television dramas and cop dramas shape and reshape the discourses of state power, corruption, and market reform through the vast array of stories and images with which they fill the prime-time slots? How does China Central Television, the state’s mouthpiece that claims to be the most prestigious and authoritative television station in China, become a source of parodies and jokes in popular culture? In what ways is state power diluted or corroborated by popular culture? These questions define most of what I do in my research and graduate teaching. [more info.] email
Antje Budde
Professor of Comparative Literature and U.C. Drama
The focus of my teaching is intercultural theatre, the theory and history of modern, post-modern and post-colonial theatre and drama in China, Germany and recently Canada in the 20th and 21st century. I am particularly interested in experimental and alternative theatre which is as politically engaged as it is aesthetically. My teaching includes intercultural comparison of theatre as a public forum for alternative thinking, civil disobedience and playful resistance. Feminism, Marxism, theatre studies, cultural and post-colonial studies provide the theoretical framework.
My research includes works in the above mentioned areas as well as in media and television studies mainly in regard to the history and aftermath of East German television before the Wall fell in 1989, during the ‘Wende’ (1989-1992) until recently. My special interest here is how women’s roles are shaped by media and social history in the context of the Cold War, utopian concepts of socialism and the reality of a capitalist democratic nation state under the pressures of globalization.
My publications include two books Theater und Experiment in der VR China (2008) and Herrschaft des Symbolischen (200), the latter edited with Joachim Fiebach. Recent book chapters and articles discuss television documentaries about the East German Punk movement, the Chinese perception of Goethe’s “Faust” in recent theatre productions, as well as a comparison of performativity and theatricality in the performances and media practices of Obama, Brecht, and Chris Kondek.
I also work artistically in the field of experimental theatre and intercultural exhibition projects. Recent works include the multi-media performance project “Miss Toronto gets a life in Parkdale” (Toronto 2009) and the exhibition installation project “Qingdao (Tsingtau) Open Spaces Layered Cultures” (Berlin, 2007). [more info.] email
Eric Cazdyn
Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies (also affiliated with the Cinema Studies and Literary Studies programs)
My work is driven by an irrepressible interest in the relation between culture and capitalism. To be precise, I am not interested in the political-economy of culture or in the culture of political-economy; rather in the very problem of relation itself (the mediation of these two realms). How is capitalist crisis, for example, figured in literary form or in the framing of film shots, not to mention how aesthetic categories inform the making and consuming of (the desire for) capitalist commodities? These concerns have led me to the study of Japanese modern literature and cinema as well as to how national cultures more generally negotiate the larger context of globalization. More recently, I have been thinking deeply about psychoanalysis, with special attention on how we are contained by--and invariably break through—psychic/social formations. Finally, this has led me to my current work on illness in which I study how contemporary medical practices and discourses, such as ones that redefine the chronic and the terminal, relate to contemporary cultural and political practices—from performance art and new media to new political collectives. At bottom, I’m something like a relationologist—or what in quainter times used to be called a dialectician. [more info.] email
Rebecca Comay
Professor of Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Literary Studies; associate member of Jewish Studies and German Department
I work at the intersection of philosophy, art, and psychoanalysis, with a special focus on post-Hegelian political philosophy (including Marx, Benjamin and the Frankfurt School) and contemporary continental philosophy. I’m interested in questions of memory, trauma and the archive, and in particular in exploring the resources of psychoanalysis for social and cultural analysis. Current projects include a project on ruins, revolutionary erasure, and the theological-political idea of the tabula rasa; a project on hypochondria and the end of life (Kant and Proust); and a project on inheritance. Recent publications include Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford UP: 2010). email
Uzoma Esonwanne
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
To date, three issues have dominated my scholarship: literary reference, the theory and poetics of repetition, and psychopathologies of colonial and racial subjection (what I’ve called “the crisis of the soul”). Of these, the first has taken up the bulk of my time and, thus, yielded publications on worldly experience and literary epistemology (Bâ, So Long a Letter) and the efficacy of African novels as narratives of testimony (Ngũgĩ, A Grain of Wheat). Underlying the arguments I make in these projects has been a guiding premise: that, in the context of postcolonial African literatures, language has felt, and borne, the burdens of myth, history, and prophecy, and that to do them justice criticism cannot ignore this fact. This premise also underpins my treatment of the theory and poetics of repetition in modern culture, subjective dimensions of human experience in African literature, and literary self–making in African and Diasporic letters. Although over the years I have occasionally undertaken projects indirectly or unrelated to these issues (my Christopher Okigbo is an example), I would like to believe that such digressions deepen my understanding of these complex issues and afford me a unique scholarly vantage point. [more info.] email
Barbara Havercroft
Professor of Comparative Literature and French
My research has principally dealt with questions of subjectivity in contemporary French, Québécois, and German narrative literatures and has drawn on a number of different theories (poststructuralism, deconstruction, theories of literary genre, feminist and gender theories, discourse and enunciation theories, theories of life writing, feminist theories of autobiography, theories of intertextuality, trauma theory). My early work on subjectivity in the French nouveau roman and in the work of German writer Uwe Johnson led me to focus subsequently on the various forms of recent autobiographical writing (narratives, diaries, testimonial writing, confession, autofiction, etc.), where subject construction and self-representation are obviously crucial issues. How does the subject represent herself in the era of the crisis of representation? What are the connections between aesthetics, ethics, and politics in these autobiographical writings? Many of my publications on this latter topic dealt with the relationship between subjectivity and agency, as depicted in contemporary women’s autobiographical texts, where the relationship between agency and performativity (as developed in Judith Butler’s work) is woven into the threads of the narrative, specifically in the form of textual devices that enact Butler’s conception of agency as a variation on a repetition. Recognizing the coincidence of the ages of memoir and trauma at the turn of the millennium, my current work explores the writing of different types of trauma (illness, rape, incest, mourning, family violence, etc.) in selected autobiographical and autofictional works by French women writers of the past twenty years, a period of unprecedented attempts to speak “unspeakable” wounds. I am also the co-founder and co-director of the research group GRELFA (Groupe de recherche et d’études sur la littérature française d’aujourd’hui) and I collaborate frequently on research endeavours with scholars in France and Québec. My most recent publication is Le roman français de l’extrême contemporain: écritures, engagements, énonciations (co-editor with Pascal Michelucci and Pascal Riendeau; Éditions Nota bene, 2009). [more info.] email
Eva-Lynn Jagoe
Professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese
I read, write and teach on the nineteenth century to the present, on Europe and Latin America, on literature, film, and art. Two obsessions that I have at the moment that somehow converge: listening and affinities. The first engages listening as a critical reading and writing practice. New technologies of sound and image reproduction at the turn of the last century afforded new modes of perception and narration. It is my suspicion that the expanded and extended forms of narration of the long novel and the process of psychoanalysis are made possible through the closer scrutiny that these new technologies afford. An object, moment or affect can be exploded, slowed down, examined, made to exceed its previous boundaries of space and time. Are not psychoanalysis and the long psychological novel alike in their paucity of happenings and their dilatory, repetitious, and expansive examinations of interiority? Thus I teach long novels slowly in order to formulate a praxis that is less hampered by the urge to interpret than it is driven by an attention to how things sound, how they are expressed. I urge myself and my students to experiment with our critical practices so that we can attend not only to what is audible but to what is inaudible –omissions, absences, pauses, and transgressions. Affinities: 19th-century European, Russian, and Latin American ideas of political, literary, and affective association. In the literature of the period I have become increasingly taken with the ways that friendship, fraternity, love, and unity are not only lauded but also seen as vital to political and aesthetic movements. I’ve been teaching and reading contemporary critical theory and philosophy on community, utopianism, ethics, anarchy, and friendship. [more info.] email
Pia Kleber
Professor of Comparative Literature and Drama Study
Whether personal, social or broadly political, the definition and preservation of Human Security is central to contemporary art around the world. My own research goal is to show how central art has been and is to the conception of Human Security. All literature about Human Security to date has completely ignored the fact that artists do much more than respond to or reflect contemporary anxieties: they explore issues that other parts of society may not recognize and they offer solutions to perceived problems.
Some of the works we study in my class are: Ariane Mnouchkine (Au soleil même la nuit; Le dernier Caravanserail) ; Robert Lepage (Trilogy of Dragons ; Needles and Opium ; The Andersen Project) ; Atom Egoyan (Ararat), John Greyson and South African Aids activist , Zackie Achmat (Fig Trees); Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf (Kandahar);and Terry George’s’ Hotel Rwanda.
I investigate techniques of cross-cultural collaboration in the arts and address ways in which these activities might be made to overlap more closely with the work of social and political activists both in Canada and elsewhere in the world. I am concerned with how policies, fuelled by fear and based on misrepresentation, are constructed in a space apart from the lives they either seek to protect or seek protection from
The project’s challenge therefore is to forge a clear link between two notoriously vague concepts – “Human Security” and “Culture” – in such a way that a coherent analysis and effective strategies can emerge.
In order to undertake this unique and non-traditional inquiry I use an innovative and multidisciplinary pedagogical approach by combining students from Comparative Literature with students from the Department of Political Science under the supervision of Prof. Stephen Clarkson. The combination of students from both disciplines will help to infuse a social-scientific approach to security in international relations with a practical understanding of how creative agency can produce social change. We plan to present the progress and prospective new directions at a conference in Berlin at the end of the academic year. [more info.] email
Ann Komaromi
Professor of Comparative Literature
My work on Slavic literatures and cultures is grounded in avant-garde perspectives and post-structural theory. I have read Polish Baroque poetry anew via Derrida, and analyzed the structure of late Soviet unofficial culture with reference to Bourdieu. My preoccupation with dissidence and dissident texts has to do with the problem I perceive between a critical theory that, not content to proclaim the death of the author, threatens to kill the author and the persistent need to assert artistic autonomy and the value of individual expression. My current research focuses on late Soviet culture and dissent, including Samizdat publishing, uncensored art and imaginative prose. Bringing together history and literature with considerations of textual culture in post-print society, my methodology turns on what Jerome McGann described as the materialized text, a site where communication is visibly embedded in social and historical context. I privilege imaginative expressions (including literary and artistic texts) as utterances that foster reflection on the textual experience as such. Such reflection supports a robust Bourdieusian dialectic of interiority (individual utterance or private language) and exteriority (objective structures of society, history) that I believe to be appropriate and necessary to our globalized, post-theoretical age. [more info.] email
Neil ten Kortenaar
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
I work on African, Caribbean, and South Asian literature. I have discovered to my own ever-renewed surprise that literature is always in excess of theory. While the critic’s job is to account for the text and the world that produced the text, criticism always falls short. I have several times had the disconcerting experience of finding myself needing to return after a few years to account anew for a text I had thought I had mastered. My criticism always starts by focusing on particular moments of literary power and hermeneutical difficulty that pose a challenge to my understanding of the world. From there my work expands to address much larger questions that can be identified as postcolonial. Questions such as: why do Africans write tragedy? What if cultural imperialism were a form of spirit possession? Why does the constitutive moment of new nation-states call for sacrifice? Why is African literature more interested in the point of view of parents than other literatures are? Why do so many African and Caribbean novels take place in unnamed and pseudonymous settings? What does Salman Rushdie identify with in the figure of the Prophet? I am currently working on the many different ways that African and Caribbean writers imagine the acts of reading and writing, that is, the experience of retreating to a private space in order to confront paper. When postcolonial subjects concentrate on a page held a foot before their eyes, what happens behind their eyes? Much critical work has been done on how orality is imagined in postcolonial literature. But literacy is equally important. I also have an ongoing project that looks at the complex psychological maneuvers needed for colonial territories to be reimagined as nation-states and for their subjects to reimagine themselves as citizens. [more info.] email
Eva Kushner
Professor of French and Comparative Literature
My early studies were in Philosophy and French Literature. My thesis, Le mythe d'Orphee dans la litterature francaise contemporaine. was already comparative without my realizing it! and led to studies on classical mythology in modern literature and reflection on the aesthetics, anthropology, and the semiotics of myth. Then came books and studies on French Canadian poets, and anthologies of Quebec poetry for
translation into other languages and this became an opportunity for comparative studies of English and French Canadian poetry, and for attempting to theorize the literatures of Canada in all their multiple
and changing dimensions and interrelationships. Since 1969, I have been involved in the "Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages" series, directing its Renaissance sub-series. I have been organizer of the VIIth congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (Montreal and Ottawa, 1973), editor of its proceedings and those of the Paris (1985) congress. President of the I.C.L.A. (1979-82) and of the International Federation for Modern Languages and Literatures (1996-99). Studies on the Renaissance dialogue; critical editing of the works of XVIth century poet and philosopher Pontus de Tyard. Tracking the historical and theoretical complexities of the development of Comparative Literature in the XXth and now XXIst century in the hope that it continues to play a fruitful and perhaps a leading role among the human sciences. [more info.] email
Thomas Lahusen
Professor of Comparative Literature and History
My research combines archive-based history, cultural theory, and film. Its geographical area includes Russia, Central Asia, and China. In the last 5 years I have added documentary filmmaking to publishing. Producing and directing a film, seeing the world through a camera and editing, are for me new ways of conceptualizing and writing. For example, The Province of Lost Film (2006) is part of an ongoing project (including a book-length publication in progress) on the history of Soviet film exhibition and distribution, which came to an end when the Soviet Union disintegrated. Shot in rural Central Russia in 2004, using film clips and archival footage, the documentary is about the nostalgia of watching film collectively: in a movie house; a workers’ club; or at night, on an improvised screen hung in the village square. Employees of the former distribution and exhibition network, projectionists, and viewers reflect upon the bygone experience of “cinefication,” and more generally on the lost opportunities of the socialist dream. For information on other films, completed and in progress, and the philosophy governing their making, see the website of our production company: www.chemodanfilms.com. Chemodan, pronounced “ch [like “church”]-eh-mo-dunn,” is the Russian word for “suitcase.” The word symbolizes motion, travel, and the international component of our small group. [more info.] email
Julie LeBlanc
Professor of Comparative Literature and French
My research is driven by my passion for life-writing, word and image relationships, genetic criticism and literary theory (semiotics, hermeneutics, narratology, visual semiotics, feminist theories of autobiography, discursive analysis). Although my literary corpus is predominantly French from the 20th and 21st centuries, I have also worked extensively on English and Spanish autobiographical narratives. The integration of visual media (photographic, painted and cinematic images) into life narratives helps to foreground the complex relationship between the subjective nature of identity and its textual/visual representation. Using an interdisciplinary perspective and a multicultural corpus of visual autobiographical narratives written and produced by contemporary writers and artists, my research is focused on studying how these subjects become endowed with visual and performative skills to narrate their subjective experiences and to illustrate their personal and collective memories. The forces at the heart of my research are the inexhaustible variety of human experience and identity and the irrepressible impulse to explore, express and intellectualize identity through textual, visual and performative media. More importantly my work on illustrated autobiographical narratives and their manuscripts has led me to treat my multi-lingual corpus as visual cultural constructions deeply involved with societies, ethics, politics and the epistemology of “seeing and being seen” (Mitchell).
The seminars that I offer at the Centre for Comparative Literature and the theses that I direct reflect the multi-lingual and interdisciplinary nature of my research. My publications include three books: Genèses de soi. L’écriture du sujet féminin dans quelques journaux intimes (2008) ; Énonciation et inscription du sujet ; Les Masques and a forthcoming book: Narrativité et iconicité. I have also edited several volumes of Texte. Revue de critique et de théorie littéraire; Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry and Voix et images, focused on autobiography, word and image relationships, genetic criticism, rhetoric, semiotics and literary theory. . [more info.] email
Roland Le Huenen
Professor of Comparative Literature and French
My research deals mainly with the French Literature of the XIXth century, and moves between two poles. In 1973 I co-founded the Groupe International de Recherches Balzaciennes (GIRB), now located at the University of Paris 7, whose aim was to examine the work of the French novelist Balzac through the lens of various contemporary theoretical approaches: semiotics, genetic criticism, sociocriticism (sociocritique), among others. My early work involved the study of Balzacian characters from the vantage point of semiotics and narratology. Current concerns have led me to explore how the novel in XIXth century France creates its own tools to offer a critical representation of the social issues of the time. My second research interest has drawn on a number of different issues found in travel narratives viewed from the perspective of an open genre. What are for instance in such narratives the connections between fiction and non-fiction, between entertainment and science, between various styles of description? What changes in the structure of the traditional travel account do occur, when takes place a sudden shift of the enunciative authority, when the professional writer takes over from the merchant, the sailor, the diplomat, the missionary, the soldier, as it is the case for literary travel narratives produced in France following the publication by Chateaubriand of his Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem (1811)? Using this theoretical angle, there is still much to explore in the works of Hugo, Nerval, Gautier, Flaubert and Sand to name only a few of the XIXth century French writers who, besides fiction, drama or poetry, also wrote travel accounts. [more info.] email
Victor Li
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
I guess I’m more of a fox than a hedgehog since my research interests are eclectic and include contemporary critical and literary theory, postcolonial literatures, globalization studies, theories of modernity, primitivism, and the intersection of anthropology and literature. I am drawn to interdisciplinary and comparative work as evidenced in my book The Neo-primitivist Turn: Critical Reflections on Alterity, Culture, and Modernity (2006). I argue in that book that in many contemporary theoretical discourses primitivism has merely been ushered out the front door so that it can be surreptitiously smuggled in again through the back. Neo-primitivism can therefore be seen as a kind of anti-primitivist primitivism. The ubiquity of neo-primitivism, its ability to mutate and survive even as it is rigorously questioned, is reflected in the book’s analysis of different authors from different disciplines (continental philosophy, literary and cultural studies, anthropology, and critical theory). I’ve always been suspicious of settled orthodoxies in the humanities and firmly believe in what Kenneth Burke has described as “perspective through incongruity.” Or to cite another Burkean aphorism: “When in Rome do as the Greeks.” This sense of contrariness guides my current research project titled “Allegories of Globalization,” a critique of the representationalist ontology present in both pro- and anti- globalization discourses. I also hope in the future to start a new research project on the role of what I call “necroidealism” (tentatively defined as the elevation or apotheosis of an idea or concept through death) in contemporary theory and literature. [more info.]email
Jill Ross
Professor of Comparative Literature and Medieval Studies, University of Toronto
My work focuses on the rich literary culture of medieval Spain. My research is broad in terms of both chronology and language, moving from late antiquity up to the fifteenth century and covering texts written in Castilian, Latin, Catalan and Hebrew. My previous work explored the female body as a means of articulating questions of literary authority and practice within the cultural spheres of medieval Iberia, and demonstrated the centrality in medieval literary culture of the gendering of rhetorical and hermeneutical acts involved in the creation of texts and meaning. My work, as exemplified by my recent book, Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2008), seeks to combine both medieval and modern approaches to literature in its use of a framework rooted in classical and medieval rhetoric (i.e. premodern ‘literary theory’) as well as current theories of gender and feminist philosophy. I find the dialectic between medieval and modern theoretical articulations to be compelling and critically productive. My research also examines the cross-cultural dynamic at work medieval Iberian literatures, focusing, for example, on cultural fusion and ambiguity in a fourteenth-century poet writing in both Castilian and Hebrew, and on the cultural tensions between France and Occitania embedded in the linguistic form of a fourteenth-century bilingual Arthurian text written on the island of Mallorca. My current large project explores the hugely important, but understudied, theory of metaphor in the Middle Ages. Using medieval rhetorical and philosophical sources, I am attempting to understand metaphor an all its theoretical complexity and to hone in on some of the crucial work it accomplishes in medieval culture, ranging from its conceptual importance in the areas of Eucharistic transformation and religious conversion, to the development of an idea of ethical literary character. [more info.] email
Atsuko Sakaki
Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies
I have often inventoried my research interests as: gender relations (several book chapters); narrative performance (a book (Harvard, 1999)); cross-cultural polemics (a book (Hawai’i, 2006)); city and body (SSHRC funded, 2003-7); and the photographic narrative (SSHRC funded, 2008-current). Some might dismiss me as a (mere, or gravely disconcerting) schizophrenic. My intellectual trajectory is always motivated by the desire to critique the limitations built into the premises of my previous work, hence the jerky shifts in focus. Still, I see a degree of coherence in the subjects of inquiry: agency beyond identity; temporality beyond chronology; and spatiality beyond cartography. I am writing books on: literature that contests territoriality, by Abe Kôbô, Gotô Meisei, Hasegawa Shirô and Horie Toshiyuki, all avid readers of Franz Kafka as well as Russian, German and French authors; and literature of photographic rhetoric, by Tanizaki Jun’ichirô, Abe, Kanai Mieko (I wrote the Introduction to her latest) and Horie whose stories I plan to translate. I have translated another Kafka-esque writer, Kurahashi Yumiko (ME Sharpe, 1998). I was on the jury for the PMLA best essay prize (2005-8) and have reviewed many book and journal manuscripts, experience that I hope has enriched and stimulated my mind. email
John Zilcosky
Professor of Comparative Literature and German
I teach and write about European literature and culture from 1750 to the present—concentrating on modernism, exoticism, theories of travel and tourism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, popular culture, and the intersections of aesthetics and politics. My first book, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing, examines Kafka’s surprising love of adventure literature and argues that this biographical eccentricity forces us to reconsider his oeuvre. Making use of travel diaries, train schedules, tour guides, and colonial novels, Kafka’s Travels reveals how Kafka’s modern metaphorics of alienation emerged out of his encounter with the utopian fantasies of his day. This work piqued my curiosity about other travel writings, leading me to write essays on the “art” of getting lost, on W.G. Sebald’s and Goethe’s travels, and to edit a book about European voyages from the Enlightenment through today: Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey. In addition to my research on German literature and European travel, I maintain strong intellectual investments in comparative literature, philosophy, and literary theory (articles on Kant, Flaubert, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Freud, Adorno, Celan, Botho Strauss, Paul Auster). An Alexander von Humboldt Research Grant allowed me recently to spend a year in Berlin researching my present book— Uncanny Encounters—which investigates European anxieties about the disappearance of the “other” during the swansong of fin de siècle imperialism. [more info.] email