16077

WiSe 20/21: Online: The Philosophy of Fiction

Richard Woodward

Information for students

This course will be taught completely online. The seminar will be structured into two phases. In the first phase (which will run up to the Christmas break), we will focus on issues relating to the nature of fictionality and the sessions will be a mixture of interactive lectures aimed to provide an overview of the central topics covered in the course, which will provide a context for other sessions with in-depth discussion of papers. For these discussion sessions, students will be expected to submit three to four questions on the text prior to the seminar, which will be used to structure the subsequent discussion. In the second phase (which will begin after Christmas), the class will be split into smaller groups (hopefully 4-5 students), each of which will be assigned a topic relating to the emotional and ethical dimensions of our engagement with fiction. During this phase, the sessions will take the form of focused meetings with each group. Individually, students will be expected to write a short essay on their assigned topic, and each group will present their findings to the other groups at the end of the seminar. close

Comments

Our engagement with fictions is a distinctive feature of our lives. From an early age, we spend much of our time telling fairy tales, reading and listening to stories, attending plays, watching films and television shows, and looking at depictions of fictional situations. This course will focus on two issues about fiction that have been prominent in contemporary aesthetics, each of which is tied to one of two contrasts that aestheticians engaged with philosophical questions about fiction tend to have in mind. The first contrast arises at the level of works, i.e. the contrast between those works that we classify as being works of fiction (such as His Dark Materials and Bladerunner) and those we instead classify as being works on nonfiction (such as The Origin of Species and No Logo). And the central question that subsequently emerges is: what is it for a work to be fiction rather than nonfiction? The second contrast arises at the level of propositions, i.e. the contrast between those propositions that are fictional (such as the proposition that hobbits eat six meals a day, which is true according to The Hobbit) and those that are not fictional (such as the proposition that hobbits are tall, which is not true according to The Hobbit). And the central question that subsequently emerges is: what is it for a proposition to be fictional, i.e. what is it for something to be true according to a work of fiction? A subsidiary aim of the course is to examine how the concepts of fiction and fictionality apply outside of more traditional literary contexts — such as in photography, painting, film, and video games. close