CRWR 273 - False Documents: Fiction, Fakery, and Other Falsehoods

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
A false document is ‘a technique employed to create verisimilitude in a work of fiction.’ This can take many forms, such as epistolary novels, or fictions in the form of annotated poems, online reviews, author acknowledgements, wills, indexes, email threads, and beyond. How do we perceive verisimilitude as readers? How do we, as writers, fake it? In addition to examining literary false documents (and hoaxes and frauds), students will write a number of short fictions over the course of the semester. All will be original, new texts, of the students’ exclusive authorship, although they may not be presented as such.