Literature

Writers and scholars have long debated what makes for a great story, but Samsun Knight wanted to see whether there was a way to empirically determine which stories will be snore fests and which will leave audiences hungry for more.

Using a scientist’s tools, the novelist and economist found that “narrative reversals,” or peripeteias, were the key factor – lots of them and the bigger the better.

Samsun Knight (supplied image)

Commonly known as changes of fortune or turning points, where characters’ fortunes swing from good to bad and vice versa, Knight and his colleagues found that stories rich in these mechanisms boosted popularity and engagement with audiences through a range of media, from television to crowdfunding pitches.

“The best-written stories were always either ‘building up’ a current reversal, or introducing a new plot point,” says Knight, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

“In our analysis, the best writers were those that were able to maintain both many plot points and strong build-up for each plot point across the course of the narrative.”

The research, co-authored with Matthew D. Rocklage and Yakov Bart of Boston’s Northeastern University, was recently published in the journal Science Advances.

For the study, the researchers analyzed nearly 30,000 television shows, movies, novels, and crowdfunding pitches using computational linguistics, a blend of computer science and language analysis. The approach allowed them to quantify not only the number of a reversals in a text but also their degree or intensity by assigning numerical values to words based on how positive or negative they were.

Movies and television shows with more and bigger reversals were better rated on the popular ratings site IMDb. Books with the most and biggest reversals were downloaded more than twice as often as books with the fewest reversals from the free online library Project Gutenberg. And GoFundMe pitches with more and larger reversals were as much as 39 per cent more likely to hit their fundraising goals.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first to identify peripeteia as a key feature of a good story, with Oedipus Rex serving as a classic example. Other thinkers have since added their ideas, including American playwright and dramaturg Leon Katz, whose scholarship particularly inspired Knight’s research.

“[Katz] described the reversal as the basic unit of narrative – just as a sentence is the basic unit of a paragraph, or the syllogism is the basic unit of a logical proof,” Knight says.

In addition to helping psychologists understand how narrative works to educate, inform and inspire people, the findings may also benefit storytellers of all kinds.

“Hopefully our research can help build a pedagogy for writers that allows them to rely on the accumulated knowledge of Aristotle et al. without having to reinvent the wheel on their own every time,” says Knight.

That includes himself. With another novel on the way, he was recently working on a chapter with a big reveal.

“I realized that this drop might hit harder if I gave the character more positive moments before pulling the rug out from under them.”

�鶹��Ƶ English prof's dystopian tale explores privilege and peril in the Global South

Christopher.Sorensen — Fri, 02 Aug 2024 14:41:53 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ English prof's dystopian tale explores privilege and peril in the Global South

Christopher.Sorensen Fri, 08/02/2024 - 10:41

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Randy Boyagoda says he got the idea for his latest novel while sitting alone at the dining room table in a guest apartment in Italy, where he taught a class for several years (supplied image)

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Faculty of Arts & Science

Humanities

Literature

Subheadline

Little Sanctuary, Randy Boyagoda's first novel for young adults, is about the children of a wealthy family who are sent to a refuge on a remote island as their country is ravaged by war and disease

Randy Boyagoda, an author and University of Toronto professor, came up with the idea for his first young adult novel in 2018 while teaching a class in Rome, where he found himself alone in a guest apartment that, a year earlier, had been filled with his family.

He recently told the CBC that it was an empty dining room table that got him thinking about what one would do if they knew their loved ones were about to disappear, setting the stage his dystopian tale, Little Sanctuary.

Published in June, the novel is set in a fictional country in the Global South that is ravaged by conflict and disease. The children of a wealthy family are sent to a special camp on a remote island for safekeeping alongside other children of the elite.

However, the children discover the camp isn’t what it appears to be and become suspicious of their so-called guardians. The main character, Sabel, along with her siblings, devise a plan to escape.

Little Sanctuary is the story of children from the Global South living in a world that is falling apart.

“I don't think I started out with the intention of writing a young adult novel,” says Boyagoda, a professor of English in �鶹��Ƶ’s Faculty of Arts & Science and vice dean, undergraduate. “I wrote a short story for The Walrus that was published in 2021 during the pandemic.”

Boyagoda and his wife later organized a family book club meeting in their backyard where they talked about the short story, which he had left open-ended.

His youngest daughter had a query: What happened next?

“And it struck me as a question worth pursuing,” says Boyagoda. “So I began writing it out – what would happen next to these kids? Where would they go? What would happen to them wherever they were going?”

Boyagoda recounted the story’s origins on CBC’s Radio’s The Next Chapter.

“I really missed my family, because of the memory of when we had all been together there,” he said on the program. “I started imagining a table full of family, and then just being there by yourself. What could have changed? Why did this family disappear? That got to me, and I thought, ‘What would you do if you knew your family was going to disappear?’ You would have a final meal together, before sending your kids off for safekeeping. That's how the story started.”

Focusing on a privileged family from the Global South was intentional, Boyagoda says.

“The popularity of dystopian fiction over the last few years in television and in books has been marked by a consistent white protagonist,” he says. “Think about The Hunger Games, or Station Eleven. They tend to be privileged white people who are suddenly faced with a world that’s falling apart. And so we follow these heroes as they figure out how to survive.”

Meanwhile, other stories set in the Global South tend to involve characters who live in worlds of extreme poverty and risk.

“The Global South is also full of ridiculously wealthy people,” says Boyagoda. “So what would happen if the main characters in a dystopic novel weren't upper middle class white people? What if a young adult novel about the Global South wasn't about extremely poor brown people?”

The book begins with a quote from Franz Kafka: “Children simply don’t have any time in which they might be children.” That resonated with Boyagoda, touching on the idea that, though children are often thrust into very adult situations and are forced to act and behave like adults, their childlike behaviour still shines through.

“Sabel and her four siblings have to figure out what they're going to do when they realize things aren't as they seemed. And as a result, they don't have time to be children.

“They can't just be kids about it, they can't take for granted that they're going to be kept safe. And yet, they're still children, they still bicker. There's still sibling rivalry, even in situations where the stakes could be mortal. There's still crushes, there's still competition for attention.”

Boyagoda says the book also offers an opportunity for young readers and their parents to discuss some of the world’s current challenges.

“One of the ways that dystopia generally works is that we’re meant to imagine a version of contemporary life taken to its negative extremes,” he says. “These are books in which civil war, disease, inequality, pressures of climate have been taken to such an extreme point that things have broken in this world.

“So what happens to our humanity, to our prospects as individuals, family members and friends when current challenges and sources of division and decline are taken to their extremes? It would be my hope that a novel like this would be an occasion for parents and children together to talk these things through.”

Boyagoda also hopes young readers will enjoy rereading book.

“I've always felt this as a reader myself,” he says. “Whenever I want to reread something, that's an indicator that something significant has happened in the story that will sustain my imagination a second time through. Sometimes it's the beauty of the writing. Sometimes it's the intensity of the story. And this might be the case with Little Sanctuary – it might be to figure out the mystery in retrospect.

“In other words, there's lots of Easter eggs, but you don't see them the first time through.”

Experimental children’s book goes against the grain – and kids love it

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:35:08 +0000

Experimental children’s book goes against the grain – and kids love it

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 01/31/2024 - 15:35

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Michael Gayle participates in a Q-and-A at a Toronto bookstore with his children’s book Krumpp’s First Taste on the shelves behind him (photo by Samar Salman)

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Subheadline

Written by �鶹��Ƶ alum Michael Gayle, Krumpp’s First Taste has a darker feel and doesn't shy away from complex words and less familiar references

A cover featuring only black text on a red background. Pages of intricate, gothic illustrations drawn entirely in black and white. Big words, a freewheeling rhyming scheme and an ugly main character who hates almost everything in the world – most of all, children.

It doesn’t sound like a recipe for a successful kids’ book – but Michael Gayle says the response to Krumpp’s First Taste suggests children love the unconventional.

“The positive reactions I get from students only makes me want to experiment even more with the genre,” says Gayle, an alumnus of the University of Toronto Scarborough who writes under the pen name Magic Mike.

He published Krumpp’s First Taste last January and spent the year travelling across Europe and North America to perform readings and workshops in schools, where he got to see first-hand how children were reacting to his genre-bending creation.

The book tells the tale of Krumpp, a seemingly incorrigible grump, and Petunia, a little girl determined to cheer him up. Despite Gayle’s darker, Tim-Burton-esque visual style, Petunia looks far closer to what one would expect in a kid’s book – beaming smile, fluffy hair, massive puppy-dog eyes. Krumpp, by contrast, exudes misanthropy. With a hunched back and wearing vintage formalwear, his goblin-like face is dominated by his furrowed brow and deep frown.

He’s also the character kids gravitate toward most.

“The childhood personality is curious,” Gayle says. “There is a slightly forbidden nature to Krumpp, being as beastly and misshapen as he is for a lead picture book character, that I think deeply provokes their intrigue – theirs and adults’ interest, too.”

The two main character's of Gayle's latest work, Petunia, left, and the titular Krumpp (illustrations by Michael Gayle)

In the era of the iPad, books are already a tough sell and children’s book authors need to sway both kids and their parents, Gayle says. So, he set out to create a book any adult could find substance in – one that would transcend a target age group while still belonging in the picture book section. It’s led to the most praise of his three books and landed him seats as a panellist at events across North America.

Gayle packed the book with references to theatre and fine art – and he didn’t shy from complex words like “curmudgeon.” He also sporadically breaks into French and alludes to things that may not be on children’s radar, from loam to capers.

“A great takeaway from the last year has been the confirmation that kids care a lot less about how neatly something fits into a genre, than the experience you’re offering being one they find compelling and fun,” he says.

Not everyone gets what he’s doing, which Gayle says is perfectly fine. His style is so outside the box that his book has been placed in the graphic novel section in some bookstores and has been outright rejected by others.

Michael Gayle shares his work with students at Internacional Aravaca in Madrid, Spain (supplied image)

Gayle capped a hectic year of travel and events with a December signing and Q-and-A at a Toronto bookstore (he's embarking on a reading tour in Western Canada this spring). One audience member asked whether the book is black and white because it’s told through Krumpp’s eyes, suggesting his (initially) miserable world is devoid of colour.

Gayle, however, says he made the choice simply because it felt right for the story, but notes that unpredictable insights are a plus to making something that’s left open to interpretation.

“The stories I’ve written are the products of what has come most naturally to me to make at those moments,” he says. “I think it would sound more impressive if I lied and said these were all calculated steps to try to upend the genre. That idea doesn’t inspire me.

“I’m just a curious person, like the audience I write for, and want to see what treasures might be floating about at the bleeding edges of this thing that I love.”

Margaret Atwood reveals she’s writing a memoir: NBC’s Today

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:20:26 +0000

Margaret Atwood reveals she’s writing a memoir: NBC’s Today

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 03/08/2023 - 11:20

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(image courtesy of David Fernandez, Fisher Library)

Topic

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

�鶹��Ƶ Libraries

Victoria College

Her bibliography includes more than 50 titles spanning fiction, poetry and essays, but author Margaret Atwood says she’s tackling new terrain in her next book: her own story.

Atwood revealed on the NBC’s Today show that she’s working on a memoir – a project she’d previously denied any interest in tackling.

“That’s the kind of thing you say in your youth,” Atwood, 83, told host Jenna Bush Hager during an interview shot inside the University of Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. “You say that when you’re maybe 70.”

Atwood – who completed her bachelor’s degree at Victoria College and was a �鶹��Ƶ writer-in-residence in 1972 – talked about her latest collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood, and leafed through selections from her extensive archives housed at Fisher, which may serve as a useful resource as Atwood turns her pen on herself. “You can’t just make stuff up,” she says.

Back in the studio, Bush Hager told her Today co-hosts she was excited to spend time with Atwood at her alma mater. “�鶹��Ƶ was where Margaret did her undergrad, so it was very cool to be back there with her,” Bush Hager said, thanking Thomas Fisher for hosting the interview. “They very rarely let people film there, but of course, when the queen of Canadian literature comes, they roll out the red carpet.”

Watch the Today Interview

�鶹��Ƶ researcher sheds new light on accusations against medieval poet Chaucer: New York Times

rahul.kalvapalle — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 21:01:19 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ researcher sheds new light on accusations against medieval poet Chaucer: New York Times

rahul.kalvapalle Mon, 10/17/2022 - 17:01

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Geoffrey Chaucer, a14th-century English poet and author is depicted in a portrait from the Welsh Portrait Collection at the National Library of Wales (image via Getty Images)

Topic

Research & Innovation

Long-held assumption about 14^th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer are being challenged by new research co-led by the University of Toronto’s Sebastian Sobecki and covered by The New York Times.

In a development that has rocked the world of medieval literary studies, Sobecki, a professor in the department of English in the Faculty of Arts & Science, and Euan Roger of the British National Archives unearthed court documents that they say establish that Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne – who was previously believed to have accused Chaucer of rape – were in fact co-defendants in a labour case.

Sebastian Sobecki

The documents, discussed in The Chaucer Review, show that the case was brought by a Thomas Staundon, who accused Chaumpaigne of leaving his employment without his authorization to go work in Chaucer’s home. Sobecki and Roger found the key writ in the case, from 1379, in the records of the King’s Bench – the top criminal court in England at the time – held in a deep storage facility in a former salt mine in Cheshire in northwest England.

In a blog post discussing the discovery, Sobecki and Roger note that while it is “impossible to rule out an act of physical or sexual violence” or coercion around Chaumpaigne’s move from Staundon’s employment to Chaucer’s, the new evidence shows that the accusations against Chaucer “were not charges of rape, and they probably did not refer to a physical abduction (or at least there is no evidence for this among the court’s records), but rather related to a labour dispute.”

However, Sobecki told the New York Times that the finding shouldn’t be used to discredit the feminist critiques of Chaucer, which is why he and the journal’s editors sought commentary from three eminent feminist scholars. In their article, Sobecki and Roger also emphasized that it remains vital to continue exploring how Chaucer “participated in hegemonic discourses that shaped the lives of all women.”

Read the New York Times article

Read the scholarly article in The Chaucer Review

‘Write the stories you want to read’: SJ Sindu, author of Blue-Skinned Gods

lanthierj — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 15:54:57 +0000

‘Write the stories you want to read’: SJ Sindu, author of Blue-Skinned Gods

lanthierj Fri, 12/10/2021 - 10:54

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(Photo by Sarah Bodri)

Don Campbell

Topic

Our Community

Department of English

Literature

�鶹��Ƶ Scarborough

When SJ Sindu was younger, she couldn’t wait for her annual family vacations to Scarborough.

“Scarborough was a completely different world to where I grew up,” says Sindu, an assistant professor in the department of English at �鶹��Ƶ Scarborough.

“You could go to Tamil stores, get Tamil food, and just be surrounded by Tamilness. That was very meaningful to me.”

She says her early experiences – growing up in a conflict zone, immigrating to the U.S. and exploring her own identity as a Tamil living in the mostly white, suburban town of Amherst, Mass. – were instrumental in shaping her voice as an author.

Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, tells the story of Lucky and her husband Krishna, who married to hide the fact they are gay from their conservative Sri Lankan-American families. Her new novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, follows Kalki, a boy born with blue skin and black blood who is believed to be the reincarnation of Vishnu. He begins to doubt his divinity as his personal life and relationships fall apart, then moves to New York where he becomes embedded in the underground punk scene.

Published in Canada by Penguin Random House, the book was described by Roxane Gay as a brilliant novel “that will take hold of you and never let you go” and received glowing reviews in The Guardian and The New York Times among others. It will launch at Glad Day Books as part of their Naked Heart Festival on Dec. 18.

UTSC News spoke to Sindu about her early influences and how faith, identity and family continue to shape her writing.

How have your early influences shaped you as a writer?

I was born and lived in the northeast part of Sri Lanka until I was seven years old. A lot of my childhood and early years were shaped by the war, and being a Tamil living in Jaffna during the war.

The other was immigrating to the U.S. I was very much isolated as a kid. There were other Indians around, but there weren’t Sri Lankan Tamils. So I read a lot of books and escaped into stories. It was a way to cope with being taken out of a war situation and put into this very suburban American life without any peers or ways to explore my own identity.

Did you always want to be a writer?

I didn’t really start writing until I was in university. In fact, I started out in computer science and then fell in love with creative writing. I just loved the potential that writing fiction had for communicating the ideas that were obsessing me.

Where did the inspiration for Blue-Skinned Gods come from?

Partly the inspiration came because I lost my faith in religion. I was raised Hindu, and as a teenager I started to lose my faith and began to explore atheism. At the same time, my family became increasingly religious. So I wanted to explore that relationship.

I also saw a documentary by Vikram Ghandi called Kūmāré where he pretends to be an Indian guru and ends up gathering this large following. I was also closely watching the growing popularity of the BJP, a right-wing nationalist party in India, and interested in exploring what it meant to have a strain of fundamentalist Hindus on the rise in India and how that might affect the region.

In your first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, you also explore themes of identity, sexuality, faith and family. Why do those themes inspire your writing?

There are things I’m still trying to work out in my own life. I’m trying to figure out my relationship with my family, especially my extended family now that I’m living in Toronto. How to be part of a family that fundamentally rejects parts of who I am – the queerness, the atheism, the progressive beliefs I hold. Negotiating that with the older family members has been interesting. I’m still trying to figure it out, and I think I explore those things in my writing.

Did you have a favourite book, or one that influenced you as a writer?

There are two. The first is The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It was the first novel I read where I realized that I should and could write about my experiences with war. It’s the book that made me want to be a writer.

The second is Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai. For the first time I saw Tamilness and queerness explored together, and that was very important to see, especially in my development as a writer.

What advice do you have for your students and aspiring writers?

Write the stories you want to read. Many of my students at UTSC are racialized, many are from immigrant families, and they haven’t read a lot of stories that reflect that experience. I hope they can be inspired to write about their own experiences.

Being Black in the World: With new essay collection, Ian Williams explores experiences with anti-Black racism

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 21:14:33 +0000

Being Black in the World: With new essay collection, Ian Williams explores experiences with anti-Black racism

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 10/06/2021 - 17:14

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(Photo by Justin Morris)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Humanities

Literature

When Ian Williams was in Grade 6, a teacher told him that he shouldn’t attempt to play the French horn because the mouthpiece was too small for him. He understood that to mean that his lips were too big for the horn.

Though just 11 years old, Williams says he vividly remembers the feeling of unease – a new uncomfortable awareness that by being Black he was somehow different from his classmates.

“That sticks,” says Williams. “If you constantly learn about your race in these negative kinds of contexts, you're constantly off balance for the rest of your life, always pointing back to that experience.”

It would be the first of countless incidents when Williams was subjected to racism – often in the form of a small comment, gesture or look. He says each one of these events, which continue to this day, impacts how he moves through life, taking up valuable mental and emotional space.

Williams, an awarding-winning novelist and poet, and an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of English, has sought to capture how these experiences shaped his life and his state of mind in Disorientation: Being Black in the World, his most recent book.

This essay collection was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The winner is scheduled to be announced Nov. 3 and will take home a $60,000 prize.

Some of the essays are analytical and theoretical, covering such topics as institutional whiteness, blame culture and achieving tangible change when no one feels responsible for the systemic structures of the past.

But most are personal essays that chart Williams’s course through the world and the different receptions to his body and his presence.

“I suggest that when Black folk recognize or are informed that they're Black, it's a profoundly disorienting experience,” says Williams, who previously won the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Reproduction.

Disorientation was born out of a difficult summer in 2020 that included massive wildfires around Vancouver, where Williams was living at the time, a steady stream of racial violence and justice movements happening south of the border – as well as the global COVID-19 pandemic.

“All of these things happening in the world, it felt apocalyptic,” he says.

Amid this steady barrage of bad news, Williams felt compelled to share his experiences of being Black. As well, with so much attention being paid to racial tensions in the United States, Williams wanted to offer his perspective on racism in Canada.

“All of this media about killings, shootings, the ‘Karens’ – all of this analysis was coming up from America,” he says. “As Canadians, we tend to not centre the discussion on the Canadian landscape.

“What does race and racism look like in a middle-class suburban landscape with no bullets flying, without chokeholds? What are the tiny indignities that Black people face that multiply and accrue over time in Canada? If we can identify them, maybe we can start to address them.”

These smaller scale incidents never make the news, but they’re no less damaging and impactful, says Williams, who recalls hurtful events from every chapter of his life.

“Like walking into the department store at 16 and having the attendant look at you suspiciously because of who you are,” he says. “And this happens in elevators, in hallways – it happens all over the place.”

What’s not visible, he adds, is the constant mental assessing and processing of situations – a never-ending analysis of the environment.

“You're always receiving information about whether you're welcome or not,” says Williams. “‘Can I actually stay in this coffee shop today? Because last week, I couldn't.’

“There all of these tiny negotiations that constantly happen. And it's never just a single event. It’s all of the history that we carry with us from these constantly disorienting moments. Every time one of them happens, we get slapped in the face.”

Such incidents continue to be part of Williams’s everyday life.

“A few days ago, I’m playing tennis in Vancouver,” says Williams. “And the people on the next court only addressed my white tennis partner.”

Several times, when their ball rolled onto the adjacent court, Williams says he held up his racket and waved, asking politely for the ball back. They acted like he didn’t exist.

“Now you can say, no big deal, right? And in that moment, it would be hard for me to prove that that is a particularly racist occurrence. It’s those kinds of things that we don't want to talk about as racist activity because they’re so tiny, but that’s what racism looks like in Canada.”

The mental effort it takes to recover from these constant reminders of one's race is taxing, says Williams. “While other people move from interaction to interaction, we have to do this processing and figuring out what went wrong,” he says.

“So many of my Black friends are exhausted in a way that’s not linked to their jobs or anything. It's just linked to like being Black in the world and trying to understand and shield themselves and their loved ones from these constant impositions. If this happened to you on a weekly basis, it would wear you down.”

Despite the obvious challenges and injustices, Williams insists Disorientation is not about laying blame or pointing fingers.

“I want to create a conversational space for us to talk about race in Canada in ways that are not punitive or didactic, but just open, transparent and sincere,” he says. “I'm not the race guru, I'm not the expert on Blackness. I just want to bring our racial experiences forward and have readers understand what we're doing to each other and what systemic things are doing to all of us.”

And to achieve this, he felt nonfiction was the right choice.

“I wanted to address the reader directly without the artifice of fiction, I wanted to talk directly to somebody in their living room,” he says.

“There are many ways I could talk about race, I can code it into a character, I can create hypothetical situations, create poetry. And I've done that. But just for a moment in my career, I wanted to pause with the imaginative and just deal with the real.”

Multi-language �鶹��Ƶ project celebrates 700th anniversary of Dante's death

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 14:52:36 +0000

Multi-language �鶹��Ƶ project celebrates 700th anniversary of Dante's death

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 03/31/2021 - 10:52

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Dante displays the incipit Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita in a detail of Domenico di Michelino's painting, Florence, 1465 (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Peter Boisseau

Topic

Our Community

�鶹��Ƶ

Faculty of Arts & Science

St. Michael's College

Trinity College

The department of Italian studies in the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Arts & Science is leading a project that will see most of the cantos of Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno read in more than 30 different languages – including, for the first time, Indigenous languages.

The Toronto Salutes Dante project, timed for the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death, includes readings from the best-known section of the epic poem, Divine Comedy, in Farsi, Arabic, Swedish, Portuguese, Mandarin, American Sign Language, Russian, Slovak, Thai, Spanish, Bulgarian, German, Ukrainian and Sanskrit, as well as French, Latin, English, Italian and 10 Italian dialects.

The opening 30 lines of the first canto of The Inferno will be read in Anishinaabemowin by translator Matthias Nunno, a member of the Ojibways of Garden River First Nation who is of both Italian and Ojibway heritage. The last section of the final passage will be read in Stoney Nakoda by translator Trent Fox, a doctoral student in education at the University of Calgary who identifies as Îethka.

Both Indigenous translations were prepared specifically for the project.

“We are honoured to be able to start in Anishinaabemowin and conclude with a passage in Stoney Nakoda,” says Nicholas Terpstra, the interim Emilio Goggio chair in Italian Studies, which is largely funding the project. “The idea of starting and finishing with Indigenous languages was something we thought was particularly important in Canada.

“While Dante has been translated into many different languages, he hadn't been translated into Indigenous languages until now – so these are the first ever done.”

Organizers recruited community members, professors, students and alumni to read the cantos and share their thoughts about Dante and the canto they chose. �鶹��Ƶ alumna and former Governor General of Canada Adrienne Clarkson – who earned her bachelor of arts in English language and literature in 1960 as a member of Trinity College, a master of arts in 1962 and an honorary doctor of law in 2001 – will be among the performers.

Clarkson, who learned Italian as a doctoral student and has a special passion for Dante, will read the entire first canto in English, including the portion previously read in Anishinaabemowin.

The canto texts will also be available for download from the department’s website in Italian, English and the language its performer chose for the reading.

The canto readings are being posted at regular intervals on the department’s YouTube channel. The first video was posted on March 25, the traditional New Year’s Day in medieval Florence, where Dante was born in 1265. The series will conclude in June.

The March 25 start date is also significant because it marks the day Dante enters The Inferno, the first canticle of The Divine Comedy, which also includes two other sections: Purgatorio and Paradiso.

The Toronto Salutes Dante project is the brainchild of Terpstra, Associate Professor Elisa Brilli and �鶹��Ƶ alumnus George Ferzoco, who earned his bachelor of arts in philosophy in 1980 as a member of St. Michael’s College.

The Emilio Goggio visiting professor for the spring 2021 term in the department of Italian Studies, Ferzoco had established a tradition while teaching in the U.K. of having his students read Dante aloud to better appreciate the poem and get over their shyness around speaking Italian.

“Like most poetry, Dante is meant to be read aloud,” says Ferzoco, a visiting fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. Through the University of Calgary’s vice-provost for Indigenous engagement, he arranged for the translation by Fox of the final passage of The Inferno into Stoney Nakoda.

“I thought, ‘Well, I'm from Toronto, which is such a multicultural city. I'm in the Italian department. Can I bring something to my visiting professorship, and can it reflect the culture of the city, and indeed the country?’”

An acclaimed Dantista for her research and publications, Brilli has made �鶹��Ƶ an international centre for Dante studies through a series of annual seminars. Two years ago, the Dante Society of America held its annual meeting in Toronto, the first time the society has held a meeting outside the United States since its founding in 1881.

“Toronto Salutes Dante is rooted in research done at the University of Toronto and the events we’ve held here, like the first-ever meeting of the Dante Society of America in Canada in 2019, and my 'Dante. Les vies Nouvelles’ Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council project,” says Brilli.

“I warmly hope this new endeavour will foster collaboration among scholars, students and our community of alumni, and the broader audience interested in Dante.”

While the bulk of funding for Toronto Salutes Dante comes from the Goggio Chair, community sponsors of the project include the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Toronto (Italian Cultural Institute of Toronto) and Villa Charities.

In February, �鶹��Ƶ hosted an international event for the Italo-Indigenous community called Indigenous-Italian Canadian Connections: Starting a Conversation that was led by people of Indigenous-Italian-Canadian heritage. The event included more than 100 participants from five countries – Canada, the United States, Italy, Spain and Costa Rica. It launched a year-long research and community project at the Italian studies department’s Frank Iacobucci Centre for Italian-Canadian Studies that will include a workshop in May and a conference next year.

Jane Austen a polite, safe read? Not according to �鶹��Ƶ’s Tom Keymer

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 14:36:08 +0000

Jane Austen a polite, safe read? Not according to �鶹��Ƶ’s Tom Keymer

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 03/30/2021 - 10:36

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Tom Keymer, a �鶹��Ƶ University Professor of English, recently wrote a book about Jane Austen that explores her work and, among other things, whether she should be considered a conservative or radical writer (photo courtesy of Tom Keymer)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Literature

It’s difficult to imagine the original manuscript of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice being used as kindling for a fire, tossed into the flames one by one. But the University of Toronto’s Tom Keymer says it’s a likely scenario.

Why? Austen wasn’t a celebrity author in her time – and manuscripts, once printed, were typically discarded.

“Just think of how much it would be worth now,” he says.

Keymer – a University Professor and Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of English – recently wrote his own book about Austen’s work and hopes.

It’s titled Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics and Keymer hopes it sparks even more interest in the influential writer whose books are still adored and continue to be the inspiration for movies, television series and just about every other form of entertainment.

“I wasn't writing completely in my comfort zone,” says Keymer, whose previous book, Poetics of the Pillory, was about 17th- and 18th-century censorship. “And I think that can help when you're pushing yourself into slightly new territory.”

Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics introduces Austen’s six major novels, exploring key themes of her work, narrative techniques and the social and historical context of her fiction. He also touches on her relationship to the writing marketplace of her time, noting “although she's one of the world's most popular classic authors, she found it very difficult to get into print. It took her at least 15 years.”

“It's a short book and I’m trying to reach out to address a much broader audience,” Keymer says. “The idea is to give a general introduction to as many aspects of Jane Austen's writing as possible. But at the same time, I’m also trying to add to scholarly debates as well.”

One of those debates is whether Austen can be categorized as a conservative or radical writer. In many ways she’s both, according to Keymer.

“She writes novels with happy endings which can be seen as reaffirmations of the social status quo,” he says. “The heroine gets married, her identity is absorbed into that of her upper-class land-owning husband. And it seems to be a reaffirmation of a hierarchical society.”

But Keymer feels it’s a misconception that [Austen's] a polite, safe read. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution, she blends her own subtle statements and views on society, relationships and even politics with literary trends and traditions that enabled her work to be published.

“She walks that tightrope, but like any novelist she’s able to think in multiple ways at the same time,” says Keymer. “I think she is very conflicted. She is very divided. She's got genuine conservative impulses. She's got genuine radical impulses, and they're coming together in tremendously interesting ways.”

Equally alluring and enduring is her ability to speak to readers about the constraints of society for women.

“She gives you these full and compassionate views of women in disadvantaged social and economic circumstances, trying to navigate their way through them – often in very highly regulated societies, confronting conventions and expectations that prevent her characters really achieving much freedom of movement.”

Austen paints a distinctively 18th-century picture of how women should conduct themselves and of the barriers they face. For example, women would rarely inherit property and remained dependent on male relatives if unmarried with few career possibilities.

“These are all things that characters find ways of dealing with, and Austen finds ways of writing about,” says Keymer. “And that's something that I think speaks to readers and speaks to young readers in societies all over the world.”

The world’s love affair with Austen’s work continues. More than 20 movies have been made that are based on her books. Anyone who has seen the 1995 movie Clueless watched an adaptation of Austen’s novel Emma.

While some movies closely follow Austen’s plots and characters and attempt to be historically accurate, others take far-reaching artistic liberties such as the 2016 horror film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Keymer personally found the YouTube video Jane Austen’s Fight Club very funny.

As for books, there’s the 2009 parody novel Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and the 2009 novel Jane Bites Back with Austen returning to modern day as a vampire. And if you enjoy reading Austen with a beverage, there’s Gin Austen: 50 Cocktails to Celebrate the Novels of Jane Austen.

“There are a lot of these very amusing things,” says Keymer. “It’s a sign of her incredible popularity that you can sell something just by arbitrarily yoking the idea to Jane Austen.”

In fact, there are few writers from 200 years ago, Keymer says, that continue to have such a massive global following – and an audience that continues to grow.

“And that's why she's such a pleasure to teach,” says Keymer. “She's such a great thing for undergraduates to work from because there are so many little nuances and these clever little ticking time bombs in Austen that will suddenly go off.

“Even though there are only six novels – she died in her early forties so it’s a limited corpus – it’s so rich. There's so much still to discuss and debate.”

'I feel hope': A devastating diagnosis prompted �鶹��Ƶ alumna Natalie Jenner to pick up the pen

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 15:51:05 +0000

'I feel hope': A devastating diagnosis prompted �鶹��Ƶ alumna Natalie Jenner to pick up the pen

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 01/07/2021 - 10:51

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Natalie Jenner, an alumna of �鶹��Ƶ's Faculty of Law, published her debut novel The Jane Austen Society last spring. It's now being translated into 18 different languages (photo by Sarah Sims)

Topic

St. Michael's College

Five years ago, University of Toronto alumna Natalie Jenner decided to pursue a passion project: a bookstore in Oakville, Ont. But shortly after opening, her husband was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and terminal condition impacting the lungs.

“The majority of people diagnosed with this disease will pass away within two to three years of diagnosis,” says Jenner, a graduate of �鶹��Ƶ’s Faculty of Law and St. Michael’s College. “My husband has outlived those statistics so far.”

To cope with the devastating diagnosis, Jenner turned to her favourite author: Jane Austen. She read the author’s six novels, delved further into Austen’s life and even visited the cottage in Chawton, England where Austen worked on or wrote all six of her major novels during her final years.

“My respect for Austen is boundless in terms of what her books can give you,” says Jenner. “They regenerate and give you different things at different stages in life.”

Austen – and her works – inspired Jenner to write her own novel, which was published last spring. The Jane Austen Society tells the story of a group of villagers – a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, servant girl, a farmer, an heiress, a Sotheby's auctioneer and a Hollywood film star – who come together at the end of the Second World War to save Austen’s cottage before it is sold off to a developer. It was released last year.

As a work of historical fiction, only the book’s setting is real. The two Chawton structures featured in the story have been saved by ongoing real-life efforts and are now both public institutions.

As in her book, Jenner says a group of people met in someone's living room and decided to save the cottage – but were unable to raise the funds during the war. After it was over, a grief-stricken villager who had lost his son in battle bought and donated the cottage in his son’s memory.

“I felt the weight of history and the beauty of what was around me, and from that, I must have derived some sense of hope,” says Jenner, recalling a visit to Chawton.

“The whole time I'm reading Austen and researching her, I wasn't doing it thinking I was going to write about her at all. I was doing it purely to distract myself. I am so happy I had that light bulb moment, where I said to my family, ‘I'm ready to write again’. My husband is stable. We don't know what's around the corner. But I feel hope.

“I think through [writing] this book, [I was] able to explore grief, actively living with grief, and that moment when you decide to re-engage with life again.”

The Jane Austen Society has received several accolades, including runner-up for best historical fiction in Goodreads’ Choice Awards for Best Books of 2020 and a finalist in the debut novel category.

The novel has been sold for translation in 18 different languages.

“I never thought I'd say these words, but just being nominated is an honour in itself,” says Jenner. “The company that you're next to is such a thrill when it happens.”

Jenner previously worked as a corporate lawyer in downtown Toronto. She says her inspiration to study law came from seeing the 1973 film The Paper Chase.

“We didn't know any lawyers. They were arguing contracts law [in the film], and I was fascinated. I looked at my mother and said, ‘I don't know what they're doing – but I want to do that when I grow up.’”

After several years of practice, Jenner sought a new career path. For nearly 20 years, she worked as a career coach to national law firms.

Following her husband’s diagnosis, she closed her just-opened bookstore to focus on his health and her coaching work was put on-hold to focus on her book’s launch.

“I'm not quite ready to say that I won't be going back – I love being a coach for lawyers. I feel very lucky and blessed to have had a few careers.”

Although Jenner she says never thought The Jane Austen Society would be published – her first five novels had been rejected by agents – she has just sold her second book, which follows the later adventures of the society’s servant girl.

“We have not left our house since March because of my husband's lung health,” Jenner says. “That’s been, as everybody knows, incredibly trying. But I feel very grateful that I have this skill that I can use, whenever I want and whenever I need to.”

“This [past] year has taught everybody not only the importance of our health, but also to make the most of what we have.”