FYSP 044 - Objects and Apparitions: Poetry as Fiction and Fact

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
The word ‘poem’ comes from the Greek for ‘made thing.’ What do we mean when we say that a poem is a thing? What do we mean when we say that it is a made-up or fictional thing? This first-year seminar course is concerned with the ways that poems as ‘made things’ straddle the domains of factual, thingly reality on the one hand, and fictional, made-up imagination on the other. We will ask what kinds of work poems do, and what demands we face when we seek to ‘make sense’ of them.