The Fantastic in Literature, Part 2

About this course:

A subgenre of literary works called the fantastic creates a hesitation in the reader, who must decide whether what they perceive derives from reality. Fantastic literature, different from fantasy or science fiction, lets us encounter the ordinary and the uncanny, the everyday and the marvelous simultaneously and in ways that mirror and illuminate modern experience. In this course, we read stories by Jorge Luis Borges on dreams and labyrinths; Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities on the city as fragment and in fragments; stories by Julio Cortazar on the idea of fiction as game and fabrication; Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera as an example of magical realism; and Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 on conspiracies as explanations for the meaning of events. These works define moments of hesitation between belief and disbelief, giving us strangeness as a condition of life.