Modern Literature & Culture Research Centre & Gallery

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

Course Description

Students examine how creativity operates across contexts and disciplines through the work of diverse writers and thinkers. Topics include writing as daily practice, the social force of creativity, storytelling, and creativity in relation to gender, race, and class. Experiential field study, including visits to the AGO and the Image Centre, supports direct engagement with creative works and practices, with attention to Inuit expression and storytelling and to autobiography as a mode of shaping the self. Students develop and articulate their own creative and critical perspectives within broader international conversations about creativity.

Course Delivery and Goals

This experiential learning course engages students with texts, artworks, and creative practices while developing humanistic skills in making, reflecting, discussion, and research. Learning takes place through active inquiry, creative experimentation, and sustained critical reflection.

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.