What does experiencing a fiction entail? This year’s seminar will focus on Husserl’s phenomenological method in order to challenge and enrich current debates on fictionality. By investigating the subjective constitution of fictional experiences in Husserlian key, the question “What is a fiction?” must be turned over into: “What makes fiction fiction?”. Thus, the latter targets the “how” of fiction’s workings and regarding the question, how it can become an embodied experience. Due to the descriptive and analytical character of its approach, in addition to phenomenology’s epistemological interest, what is at stake are the mechanisms that make such experience possible; particularly, the modalization of belief in the constitution of fictional objects and the correlative “worlds” in which they take place. By exploring a phenomenological approach to fiction and fictionality in a Husserlian key, this seminar will highlight the interweaving of reality and imagination in various forms of aesthetic and cognitive experience, and will bring out the significance of fiction and imagining for the constitution of collective imaginaries and cultural memory.

 

1) Phenomenology: Basic Concepts

2) What is a Fictive Experience?

3) Fictional World(s) and Subjectivity

4) Memory and Fiction in Social and Cultural Imaginaries