Courses

In what way does literature, in the broadest sense of the term, alter our experience of what we call “reality”? How, in the Middle Ages, was literature’s means of turning and transforming lived experience used as a means for generating new experiences, altering both the perception of the world or the “who” of perception? What might the bracketing of “reality” in literary experience have a commonality with the suspension and reconfiguration of “reality” in philosophy, psychoanalysis, or in the therapeutic use of psychedelics—and what might this tell us about the “power” of literary experience? Where else might one find this particular way of turning or bending sense from the reality of its referent? This course will navigate these questions through a series of inquiries spanning historical periods and ideas. Each week is dedicated to developing differing ideas of “fiction,” “narrative,” “literature,” “the self,” “knowledge,” “transformation,” “vision,” “trance,” “the trip,” (et al.) by exploring couplings of medieval literary texts and philosophical and critical works on selected topics. We will be looking at cross- disciplinary investments in these debates (psychoanalysis, religion, law) and the way in which memory and affect both promote and hinder the narration and sense of a self.