You don't need to have attended the first part of the tutorial in SS 21 to participate in this one.
Fictional characters aren't real. Yet how "real" they feel is crucial to how deeply we are able to engage with them: a character's "realness" determines how much we are able to relate to, empathise with, or vilify them. We expect that good fiction makes us forget that characters are medial constructions without real thoughts or feelings.
In this tutorial, we will look under the hood of how character is written. Using a variety of theoretical approaches from poststructuralism, phenomenology and affect theory (among others), we will try to understand how we are able to perform deep affective interactions with fictional characters. At the same time, we will discuss how we write ourselves and others as real-world subjects and how cultural texts shape our sense of self and other. Ultimately, we will try to move towards a mode of reading that stresses the emotional attachment and affective communities which fiction is able to construct across place and time.
This tutorial is designed with an interdisciplinary focus. Using texts from across the spectrum of the humanities and incorporating fields such as postcolonial and queer theory, we will also work intersectionally. In addition, we will take the time to experiment with ways of narrating Self and Other, such as autoethnography and archival fiction.
Students from all departments are welcome! Texts and communication will be in English. |