Most readers of Shakespeare know the line: “All the world’s a stage and all men and women merely players”. And, as a Spanish contemporary of his would add: Life Is A Dream. Surely, those celebrated writers are kidding, aren’t they? Before one hastens to brush away such a persistent statements as mere metaphors, one might want to understand the reasons of their very persistence and weigh them against the uses of fiction in daily life. Indeed, there is no shortage of works, characters, images or practices that blur the boundaries between life and fiction. From the myth of Pandora to TV series such as Westworld, from Inception to commercial fiction, from childhood role plays to video games, from colonial expeditions and myths to cosplays it is the entire spectrum of our history, knowledge, actions, relations, leisure and even identities that are pervaded by fiction. The course aims at taking a fresh and critical look at fiction and its assumed opposition to reality and exploring the ways, big and small, in which fiction and narrative imagination shape our lives and the world we live in.
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