Sonia Werner

At a moment when popular culture is obsessed with reality television and new technology generates “real-time” access to current events, this course examines the concept of reality in literature, philosophy, and film. What is the relationship between language and reality? How do different literary genres and media represent the world around us? How do textual and visual representations mediate our understanding of the “true” and the “real?” We will begin the course by examining key philosophical works by Plato, G. H. Hegel, and Karl Marx. We will consider the emergence of realism in the 19th century and assess how writers like Nikolai Gogol, Herman Melville, and Charles Baudelaire engaged questions related to industrialization and the experience of urban life. We will then bring these works into conversation with more contemporary literary works associated with disparate aesthetic movements—such as surrealism, modernism, and magical realism—by authors like Aimé Césaire, André Breton, Virginia Woolf, Alejo Carpentier, and Teju Cole. We will probe deeply into the category of the “everyday” to explore questions relating to race, gender, and sexuality. Lastly, we will consider the force of the photographic image and assess its relationship to evidence and truth in the context of the 19th century, as well as in our own contemporary moment. Other authors include, but are not limited to, Roman Jakobson, Georg Lukács, Henri Lefebvre, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Sara Ahmad, and Claudia Rankine.