17387

SoSe 23: MÜ-Studying the Present Moment: Challenging Realities: (Historical) Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Theory

Peter Löffelbein

Comments

The question of what can or cannot be construed as ‘real’ is as old as philosophy. In recent years, the constructivist paradigm of reality being a product of social and/or linguistic structures – long favoured in Western discourse – has been facing challenges from unexpected quarters. The so-called turn to the postfactual in (most notably US-American and British) politics has prompted an urge to re-evaluate the notion of objectivity. The threat of environmental catastrophe has brought to attention the necessity to look beyond social and linguistic dynamics for mapping the constitution of the (more-than-)human world.

In this course, we will look at various attempts to cope with these developments. We shall discuss how cultural (and literary) theorists aim at overcoming the divide between ‘the real’ and ‘the imagined’, ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, thus re-evaluating established notions of reality, history, fiction, and epistemology.

This course complements HS 17386 Now and Then: The Past and Presence of Historiographic Metafiction