What is a "Fiction"?

Catalog description

What kind of thing is a fiction? How do imaginary creations exist in relation to the “real” world? What are the points of contact between actual and imaginary experiences? Is fiction immaterial (an idea) or material (words on a page)? What kinds of knowledge can a fiction produce? Are fictions nothing but lies? This seminar investigates such philosophical problems in the context of pre-modern theories of fiction: what it is, how it works, and why it matters. We will survey a range of genres, including drama, poetry, romance, utopia, travel narrative, philosophical prose, philosophical dialogue, the familiar essay, and the humanist letter. In addition to studying a variety of literary texts from antiquity through the seventeenth century, we will explore how different technical discourses define “fiction” in the period, including poetics, rhetoric, natural philosophy, natural history, ethnography, the occult arts, mechanical philosophy, and theology. Readings will include Hesiod, Plato, Lucian, Mandeville, More, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Bacon, Webster, Milton, Cavendish, Hobbes, and Behn.