We love fiction and we hate lies. We admire artists whose flights of fancy push the boundaries of our own minds to the outer limits of the possible and feel nothing but contempt toward those who seek to deceive us. What explains the difference? In a world where the virtual gets to occupy an ever-larger share of our once material lives and where those who supposedly “tell it like it is” seem to have lost contact with the truth, it has become clear that what doesn’t exist does. In this course, we’ll enjoy our love of fiction but also probe our ambiguous feelings toward the false, the envisioned, and the merely unprecedented. We will look at various modes of falsehood and invention, from lies and deceptions to vision and creativity, and ask ourselves to what extent taking liberties with the truth may actually liberate us. We will not, however, approach these questions from a moral standpoint—who and what is right or wrong—but, keeping in mind the meanings of the verb “fabricate,” think about what things that seem unreal do and how they do it: in other words, what we’re actually making when we’re making something up.

The course will include a variety of texts and films that deal with themes such as imagination, self-invention, world-making, pretending, inauthenticity, artifice, imitation, deception, illusion, delusion, fabrication, and why on earth we let ourselves believe that sweet talker we knew damn well was full of it.

Taught in French.