A copy of the GEOG 4280 3.0 syllabus may be downloaded for reference and printing by clicking here.

Imagining Toronto GEOG 4280 3.0 Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts York University, Toronto Winter Term 2009-2010

“There is no city that does not dream

from its foundations. The lost lake

crumbling in the hands of brickmakers,

the floor of the ravine where light lies broken

with the memory of rivers. All the winters

stored in that geologic

garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway

at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones

under the rumbling track.”

(Anne Michaels, “There is No City That Does Not Dream”. Skin Divers. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999: 16)

Instructor

Amy Lavender Harris, B.A. (Hons.), M.PL., M.IR.

E-mail:

Office hours: Wednesdays 3:00 to 4:00 pm, Ross S404C

Time and Location

Wednesdays, 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm          Location: Vari Hall 1018

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/post‑modernity dialectic, among others) precedes an exploration of topics including (1) constructing identity and place, (2) immigrant 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.  (Source: Department of Geography Undergraduate Supplementary Calendar, 2009/2010)

Course Website

Introduction: The City as Text

In the iconic Toronto novel, In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje writes that “before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.”  With vivid language Ondaatje shows us how the city is conjured into being by acts of imagination that flesh out and give form to its physical and cultural terrain. As we navigate the city in restless pursuit of accommodation, commerce and community, we give the city meaning through narrative, through stories that help us chart a course between the concrete, lived city and the city as we understand, fear, remember and dream it. Ondaatje’s words echo urban commentator Jonathan Raban’s observation in Soft City that “[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, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”  Ondaatje and Raban remind us that the cities we live in are made not merely of brick and mortar, or bureaucracy and money, but are equally the invention of our memories and imaginations. We realise that our cities unfold not only in the building but in the telling of them.

Toronto is a city of stories that accumulate in fragments between the aggressive thrust of its downtown towers and the primordial dream of the city’s ravines. In these fragments are found narratives of unfinished journeys and incomplete arrivals, chronicles of all the violence, poverty, ambition and hope that give shape to this city and the lives laid down in it. Toronto poet Dionne Brand calls these narratives “the biographies of streets,” and adds, “at these crossroads, transient selves flare / in the individual drama, in the faith of translation.”  It is here at these interstices that the city’s stories gain their deepest resonance, in the liminal spaces between the pavements and the shadows of the passersby who leave their imprint upon them.

In his story, “The Inner Inner City”, science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson describes a “paracartographic map” of Toronto in which the visible city is only a mirror of the imagined city, an unchartable labyrinth of hidden avenues laid deep within its core. “There’s a city inside the city,” he writes, “the city at the center of the map.”  This course is a pilgrimage into the city within the city. Beginning with the familiar terrain – the ravines, downtown towers, neighbourhoods and inhabitants who give shape to Toronto – it ventures deep into the imagined city, dowsing for meaning in literary representations of Toronto as its inhabitants experience and narrate it. It explores how we arrive and who we become in this city; how we live, love, and make the city home, and how the city changes us even as we alter its contours.

This course is motivated by a conviction that literature, given its unique capacity to confront the most pressing urban concerns — bigotry, poverty and violence as well as tolerance, asylum, desire and ambition — is uniquely able to help Torontonians transcend difference in this most culturally diverse of cities.  In this respect the course is predicated on a belief Toronto’s literature reflects an entirely new kind of city, a city forged not through shared tradition or a long history but rather out of a commitment to the virtues of diversity, tolerance and cultural understanding.

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
10 %	Presentation of selected course reading(s) Each student will sign up to present a course reading from the syllabus / reading list. You will be graded on your presentation of the material and leadership of the ensuing discussion (5%) and a short (1-2 page) presentation outline you will be required to submit on the day you present (5%).	Presentation dates vary
30 %	Short reading response pieces (3, worth 10% each) First reading response piece Second reading response piece Third reading response piece These short reading response assignments (length: 2 to 4 pages each) will invite you to respond to readings and mediate upon themes we encounter during the course.	January 27, 2010 February 24, 2010 March 24, 2010
10%	Writing the City During the term you will be asked to write one short (4-5 page) imaginative work (which may be poetry, prose, drama or any other literary form) engaging in some way with Toronto.	March 31, 2010
40 %	Research paper (12 to 15 pages) The research paper will reflect your scholarly investigation of one of more themes, genres, places, periods, or authors encountered during the course.	April 5, 2010
Total: 100%
Late penalties: Late submissions will be subject to a penalty of 5% per day.

Course Readings

Brand, Dionne, 2005. What We All Long For. Toronto: Knopf. [This novel is available for purchase at most Toronto-area bookstores. It has also been placed on reserve at Scott Library.]

In addition, 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 on-line. A large electronic catalogue of Toronto literary and critical sources is available at http://www.imaginingtoronto.com

Schedule and Readings

Week	Date	Agenda and Readings	Work Due
1	January 6	Introduction: The Imagined City Michaels, Anne, 1999. “There is No City That Does Not Dream.” From Skin Divers. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
2	January 13	The City as Text 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. Cain, Stephen, 2006. Annexing a space for poetry in the new Toronto.  In The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto, ed. Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio and Jonny Dovercourt, 90-99. Toronto: Coach House.
3	January 20	Toronto’s Literary Cartographies MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 1972. “House of the Whale” from Noman. Toronto: Oberon. Michaels, Anne, 1996. Excerpt (“The Way Station”) from Fugitive Pieces. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Harris, Amy Lavender, 2006. Toronto’s Tower of Babel. In The State of the Arts: Living with Culture in Toronto, ed. Alana Wilcox, Christina Palassio and Jonny Dovercourt, 162-167. Toronto: Coach House.
4	January 27	The Myth of the Multicultural City Vassanji, M.G., 1991. Excerpt (Chapter from No New Land. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Birney, Earle Birney, 1969. “Anglosaxon Street.” In The Poems of Earle Birney. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. Bhaggiyadatta, Krisantha Sri, 1981. “Let’s Have Some Race Talk.” In Domestic Bliss. Toronto: Is Five Press, page 48. Iyer, Pico, 2000. The Multiculture. In The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home. New York: Knopf.	First reading response assignment due
5	February 3	The Labouring City: Narratives of Work Garner, Hugh, 1968. Excepts (Chapters 3, 5 and 12) from Cabbagetown. Toronto: Ryerson. 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
6	February 10	Possibilities of Dwelling: Home and Homelessness in Toronto Literature Bishop-Stall, Shaghnessy, 2004. Excerpt (“December”) from Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown. Toronto: Random House. Scrimger, Richard, 1996. Excerpt (pages 1-9; 15-23) from Crosstown. Toronto: Riverbank Press. 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.
	February 17	Reading week No class, but please read Dionne Brand’s novel, What We All Long for
7	February 24	What We All Long For: A Discussion of Dionne Brand’s Toronto Brand, Dionne, 2005. What We All Long For. Toronto: Knopf.	Second reading response assignment due
8	March 3	Desire Lines: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality in Toronto Literature Jones, Daniel, 1985. “Things That I Have Put into my Asshole.” From the brave never write poetry. Toronto: Coach House Press. Marche, Stephen, 2005. Excerpt (“The Bodies of Raymond and Hannah”) from Raymond and Hannah. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. 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.
9	March 10	The Wisdom of Age 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.
10	March 17	City Limits Berry, Michelle, 2005. Excerpts (pages 1-5) from Blind Crescent. Toronto: Penguin Canada. Maharaj, Rabindranath, 1997. Excerpt (chapter 2) from Homer in Flight. Fredericton, N.B.: Goose Lane. Milton, Paul. 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.
11	March 24	Fantastic Toronto: Speculative Representations of the City 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.	Third reading response assignment due
12	March 31	Finale: Distilling the Imagined City MacEwen, Gwendolyn, 1987. “Sunlight at Sherbourne and Bloor.” From Afterworlds. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart.
	April 5		Research paper due