Fiction has always has a tense relationship with reality. Is fiction more real than reality, as literary characters come to ‘life’, or is fiction a betrayal of reality?
You will engage with the blurred lines between literature, science and myth. From the moment of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, in tension between the ‘clear’ vision of reality and the power of myth, the course traces out the crisis of realism, from fantasy literature to modernism to the avant-garde.