ENGL 459: Topics in Transatlantic and/or World Literature

Questions of Evidence ~ Dr. Donig

 

In a world of “fake news,” “truthiness,” and “the big lie,” how do we think about evidence? How can we verify the reality of truth, and what methods can determine proof? 

And what’s the role of fiction and literature in establishing proof about the real world? 

What is evidence in a book or a poem? When we say that a book has multiple possible interpretations, hidden messages, and codes that exist beyond the words on the page, are we reading the evidence, or are we reading too much into it? 

In this course, we will look at literature where analyzing and interpreting evidence becomes a problem for the characters, narrator, or plot. We will see characters and narrators walk the fine line between seeing things in evidence that others cannot and, well, maybe just seeing things. And we will look at texts that perhaps give up on the idea of evidence entirely and instead attempt to find other ways to work toward proof. We will especially look at what it means to establish reality in a global context. Reading across literary traditions, through narratives from a diversity of spaces and groups around the world, we will think about how we can establish a shared reality, and how, perhaps, literature works to enable—or block—that shared sense of reality and agreements, across borders, about what counts as verified proof. We will look at the way that fiction seeks to establish factual evidence about the state of affairs in the “real” world, and we will look at how factual accounts may enlist techniques of fiction in order to substantiate such “reality.” 

In addition, we will think about how evidence fits into a broad array of diverse cultures beyond the type of verification standardized by the West. How do we think about divination, voodoo, or prophecy as forms of proof-finding? We will read writings in a number of different genres, we will look at archival material, and we’ll watch some films as well. Students will be asked to think critically about how the themes of the course play out differently in different disciplines, media, and also in a diverse range of cultural contexts. 

 

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