Fiction

In this seminar we will study the vocabulary and practices of intellectual elaboration and composition during the pre-modern eras, within the context of Philosophical and Scientific Fictions. Some of our fields of inquiry will be: Iberian Studies, Mediterranean Studies, Medieval Theory and Philosophy, Manuscript Studies, and History of the Book. We will investigate these fields in dialogue with the construction and development of pre-modern disciplines. We will to focus on mainstream views of intellectual creation, including poetics, rhetorics, dialectic, problem-creation, the lie as an intellectual fabrication, narrative of the self, oneirocriticism, legal fiction, sacred and lay exegesis, miracles, fables, and poetry with music. The survey covers two parts (scientific discipline versus experience) that hinge on the particular and even central problem of the narrative of the self—and in a way we will be traveling back and forth between discipline and experience trying not to disentangle them too much. This focus—perhaps a bit obscure for now—will become more evident as we read the different texts. My suggested and recommended readings cover many other texts from the Antiquity to the (very) Early Modern period. In this sense, I aim to forge a broad intellectual context for a set of Iberian texts that might be considered within a theoretical survey of Medieval Iberian cultures.