After he caused a shit storm for his comments on female and Chinese writers, Canadian author David Gilmour is once again teaching several classes at the University of Toronto.

Gilmour is teaching two classes this semester. One is a seminar on modern fiction and the other is a course on novel writing. The former includes a single class on American novelist Laurie Moore. The syllabus for the class also mentions Virginia Woolf, though none of her esteemed works appear on the class’s required reading list.

The comment he made during an interview with Hazlitt were the cause of the uproar last year. “I’m not interested in teaching books by women… when I was given this job I said I would teach only the people that I truly, truly love. And, unfortunately, none of those happen to be Chinese, or women,” said Gilmour to former Toronto Standard contributor Emily Keeler. Her full interview with Gilmour can be found here.

In a followup interview with the Toronto Star, Gilmour said, “My only point is that I tend to teach people whose lives are close to my own,” he said. “I’m an old guy and I understand about old guys.” One of Gilmour’s colleagues at U of T, English Professor Holger Syme criticized him in a post on his blog, saying “Good teaching requires empathy — an effort to understand things, ideas, and people totally unlike you.”

Gilmour has been teaching at U of T since 2007. [via Toronto Star]

Image via Flickr user Nayu Kim.
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Igor Bonifacic is the managing editor of Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter.

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