Garry Martin Leonard
Professor, Division of Humanities (English)


Office: H 512 Phone: (416) 287-7141
E-mail : leonard@scar.utoronto.ca; leonardgarry@hotmail.com

Profile

My general area is Twentieth Century literature. I have published two books so far. The first was on James Joyce's Dubliners and featured the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. The second book dealt with Advertising and Commodity Culture in all of Joyce's fiction. The new book is called Making it New: Technology and Sub jectivity in Modernity and Modernism. It looks at various ways people came to understand themselves in the modern city, and how this mode of understanding is reflected in the literature and art of the time. Specific writers include Andre Breton, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Henry Miller and Anais Nin.

I also teach the survey of American literature as well as a more specialized course: The West in American literature. The course begins with the Indian Captivity Narrative of Mary Rowlandson and features The Last of the Mohicans, The Martian Chronicles and Sam Shepard's True West.

For ten years I've taught A11: Introduction to Twentieth Century Literature. We discuss such themes as the loss of transcendental certitude, the rise of commodity culture, the crisis of identity and gender, and other topics in works such as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Joyce's Dubliners, Naipaul's Miguel Street, Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Genet's The Balcony. Poetry includes works by TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, Derek Walcott, Robert Lowell, WB Yeats and more. With the coming of the trimester system, this class has been split into A10 and A11. It will also be moved into the ARC--the new amphitheatre on campus--to accommodate the continually expanding enrollment.

I also co-teach a course with Art History Professor Lora Carney: The Body: Theory and Representations. We discuss the cubism of Picasso, the stream of consciousness of Joyce, the photography of Cindy Sherman, the slapstick of Charlie Chaplin, the case studies of Freud, the poetry of Sylvia Plath, the graphic art of Barbara Kruger, and much more, all in an attempt to understand how the "body" became a point of contention where social, economic and psychological issues were contested and established.

An important part of my new book also concerns early cinema and the formation of such film genres as the Hollywood Western, the Hollywood Romance, the Hollywood Melodrama, and Film Noir. I also teach courses in film genre at the School of Continuing Studies. This Fall, I will teach B75, which looks at the genres of: melodrama, film noir and the Western, and in the Spring I will teach a course on: Romance, the Gothic, and Science Fiction.

Another book length project I have begun concerns the theme of Adoption and the "Bastard" in Literature; I am designing a course along these lines. The course/book will involve itself with writers as diverse as Shakespeare (King Lear), Dickens, Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Edward Albee and Sam Shepard, and will look at the wider context of the child without natural parents as "hero" in Western Culture as depicted in such figures as Oedipus Rex, Moses and Superman.

Finally, I write poetry and prose and teach creative writing whenever possible.

CLASSES I AM SCHEDULED TO TEACH NEXT YEAR (2003-04):

A10/11 Introduction to Twentieth Century Literature (M 4-5; F 1-3) B75(Fall)Cinema: Melodrama, Film Noir, The Western") (M 1-3; F Noon to 1); B76(Spring)Cinema: Romance, the Gothic, Science Fiction(M 1-3; F11-12) C59(Fall) The Myth of the West in American Literature" Th 6-9 D40(Spring) Confessional Poetry in America: 1950-to the Present W 2-4

Committees and other responsibilites

E. ADMINISTRATIVE POSITIONS

Scarborough College: 2001-02 Appointments Committee, Tenure Stream Search, English 2000-01 Discipline Representative, English; Supervisor of Studies 2000-01 Appointments Committee, Tenure Stream Search, English 1999-00 Discipline Representative, English 1999-00 Appointments Committee, Tenure Stream Search, English 1999-00 Humanities Division Advisory Committee 1998-99 Appointments Committee, Tenure Stream Search, English 1996-97 Appointments Committee, Tenure Stream Search, English 1996-97 Task Force to Reconfigure Governance at the Scarborough Campus 1995-96 Appointments Committee, Tenure Stream Search, English 1994-95 Appointments Committee, Tenure Stream Search, English 1993-95 Library Advisory Committee 1993-95 Chair, Cultural Affairs Committee 1993-94 Appointments Committee, Women's Studies

Current Projects

Research Interests

Twentieth-Century Literature Modernism/Post-Modernism Contemporary Theory Cultural Studies Film Studies Film Genres: --Melodrama --Romance --The Western --The Gothic/Horror --Film Noir --Science Fiction Popular Culture: Advertising and Mass-Media

Individual writers of particular interest:

James Joyce; Ernest Hemingway; Jean Rhys; Gertrude Stein; Djuna Barnes; Virginia Woolf; TS Eliot; Wallace Stevens; Sam Shepard; Edward Albee;

_____________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________ NEW CINEMA CLASSES ! ! ! !

The Cinema class I taught in the Summer of '03 (B75)enrolled 50; I taught it again in the Fall to 80, and my first time out with B76 is enrolled at 158!

So now I've designed two new Cinema classes for the C level, and one for the D level. The first is "War in Cinema" with the first one being the Vietnam War. Susequent offerings will vary the topic (WW I, WWII). The second is called "Topics in Cinema" with rotating topics. The first offering will be "Madness in cinema". The D level offering is "Avant-Garde" cinema, including the surrrealists, as well as contemporary experimental film.

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Publications

Courses

Postal Address

Garry Leonard
Division of Humanities
University of Toronto at Scarborough
1265 Military Trail
Scarborough, Ont.
Canada
M1C 1A4
Last Modified Thu Nov 13 15:31:58 2003