Modern Literature & Culture Research Centre & Gallery

Amitava Kumar, Coronavirusdiary Day 29, 10 April 2020, drawing. Courtesy of the artist.

Amitava Kumar, Coronavirusdiary Day 29, 10 April 2020, drawing.
Courtesy of the artist.

 

Where: Toronto Metropolitan University
Instructor: Dr. Irene Gammel
Contact: gammel@ryerson.ca

Course Description

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed how we look at infectious disease and social disruption in literature, communication, and culture, forcing us to acknowledge our vulnerability and resilience. How has the pandemic shaped literary, visual, and media narratives? To what extent can imaginative acts provide personal and communal guidance? This course provides graduate students with an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which we cope with the pandemic imaginatively and creatively, revealing how illness shapes narratives, selves, and social relationships. In a discussion-based seminar, students consider literary writings, life writing, visual art, comics, and social theories, alongside themes and theories of the everyday and COVID-19. The course involves research and research creation culminating in a symposium that allows students to test their ideas publicly. This Zoom-mediated course also includes guest lectures and networking opportunities with international scholars.

 

Pandemic Debriefs: A Communication and Culture Symposium on COVID-19

The Great War in Literature and Visual Culture

MLC Themes

The Great War in Literature and Visual Culture

Amid the unprecedented social change of World War I, women renegotiated their identities by dramatically changing the way they engaged with the arts. But how did they do so? And how did everyday citizens engage with the war?
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

MLC Themes

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, considered by many to be the mother of Dada, was a daringly innovative poet and an early creator of junk sculpture. “The Baroness” was best known for her sexually charged, often controversial performances.
Modernism in the World

MLC Themes

Modernism in the World

Recent research has departed from the Euro-centric and national view of Modernism to include approaches and methods studying Modernism across national boundaries and across different art forms to include fashion, dance, performance, technology, and visual culture.
Lucy Maud Montgomery

MLC Themes

Lucy Maud Montgomery

L.M. Montgomery is perhaps Canada's most important literary export. She was prolific writer of over 500 short stories and poems, and twenty novels, including the beloved Anne of Green Gables.
Canadian Modernism

MLC Themes

Canadian Modernism

The works of numerous Canadian authors who lived during the modernist era may well constitute the most central and experimental articulation of Canadian modernism in prose, allowing authors to stage cross-cultural, controversial, and even conflicted identities.
Modernist Biography and Life Writing

MLC Themes

Modernist Biography and Life Writing

Life writing, including autobiographical accounts, diaries, letters and testimonials written or told by women and men whose political, literary or philosophical purposes are central to their lives, has become a standard tool for communication and the dissemination of information.