HSEM2245H: Faking It

From charges of election mismanagement to luxury handbags, debates about what is false and what to do about it seem to define our contemporary era. But we have always lived with fakes. What has changed, perhaps, is how we integrate forgery, shams, imitations, and made-up stories into our culture and what they tell us about our values. We’ll think about our current problems and commitments to the authentic and the real by examining ideas, practices, and representations from Europe’s early modern era, a period when notions of what was fake were not yet codified. Our point of departure will be texts, images, and practitioners in theater, literature, art, and history. We will also explore ethical and philosophical debates on representation and authenticity. Who decides what is authentic? Is there an ethical difference between a fake artifact and a false claim? We’ll consider the fabrication of fakery (counterfeiting, forging, special effects) to investigate how we have sorted out truth from false and how we make the difference sometimes very blurry. This course will have a mixture of reading, discussion, guest experts, and experiential learning. Guest researchers will present their research on authenticity and fakery. We will enlist historians of the book, curators, artists, craftspeople, and others whose expertise can help us spot—or craft—a fake. All readings in English.

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