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Do we need fiction? And if so, why? Can’t we confront reality as such? 

This master seminar starts from the observation that it is impossible to imagine the (or any) world without fiction. The very idea of a unified world itself is already a fiction. Fiction therefore, it seems, is not only something that doesn’t exist or that is purely made-up, as commonsense wants you to believe. It is an often unseen yet undeniable part of the way in which we construct and inhabit our everyday world - take your own self-image as a simple example. Fiction is part of the world(s) we share, making it shareable in a specific way. 

This is the point where art comes in. How does literary (or artistically forged) fiction relate to the fictions we live by, the fictions we share as part of our world-making and that shape our cultural horizon? Is fiction a way to avoid or escape reality, or a way to confront and come to terms with it? What makes the difference? And what are we ourselves looking for when we enter a literary fiction? Bliss, forgetfulness? Or the flesh of reality itself, its ungraspable truth made tangible?

In order to get a grip on these research questions we will both study the use(s) of fiction in our own time and make one of our own, bringing together a diversity of individual inroads on the labyrinth between fantasy and truth. We’ll start out from collective reflection, reading and watching (both theoretically and artistically, featuring e.a. D.W. Winnicott, Olivia Laing, Oliver Sacks, Walter Benjamin, Mark Fisher, Adam Curtis, Sianne Ngai, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Marguerite Duras, Italo Calvino, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison,…) And we will gradually mix the collective reflection more and more with feedback sessions (individually, or peer to peer) that will help you to develop and share your own reflective fiction. In sum, one could say that we will explore the ins and outs of fiction in order to understand what we share in reality, why we need fiction to do so and, last but not least, so as to question the very reality we share: what reality, whose reality, the reality of ‘climate change’, the reality of an arrested future, your personal one? Or is fiction the very medium humankind has at its disposal (developed for what reason?) to actually mediate between the micro and macro, personal and impersonal issues of life? 

If you are interested in a time-based, critical analysis how fictions shape our reality and want to explore yourself how artistic or self-aware fictions are able to mediate (or remediate) the relation between the real and the unreal, the false and the true: this seminar is the place for you to be. You will be warmly encouraged to develop your own reflective take on fiction, for instance by focusing on a specific interest in illusions, in magic, in the apocalyptical, in ideology, in truthseeking, in prophesy, in hallucinations or other nearby notions. And ultimately, you will be stimulated to find out in practice whether you want to use fiction in your own work as a means to celebrate the potential of the imagination, as a tool to pass beyond the illusions we live by or as a necessary detour to get closer to a shared reality. Fiction will become a matter of aesthetics, ethics and politics, but above all: a medium that is fun to play with.

Course material

Reader of essays and fictions will be available via Toledo. List of must-see-films and must-read-novels. 

Format: more information

Reseach seminar with theoretical input, collective reading and watching, stimulating discussions on film and literature, alternated with working sessions, peer to peer-feedback and group presentations. If needed, due to the corona-crisis and in response to the sanitary measures in place at the time, the seminar will be held partly or mainly online. In that case, the schedule of the seminar can be rearranged as well in order to find a productive balance between meeting virtually and irl, reading, writing and discussing.