Facts and Fictions: Writing the New World in Early Modernity (1500-1700)

How was knowledge about the colonies in America established? What was the role of fiction in this process? This course introduces students to major problems at the intersection of literature and history. It provides students with an overview of historical and fictional writings that shaped the early modern imagination about colonial spaces in Europe and the Americas. Students will look into the process whereby poets and novelists made unfamiliar places more familiar to their European and American audiences, as well as into how historians used myths and fictions to build knowledge about those foreign places and cultures. Readings span fictional prose, histories, epic poems, philosophical writings, engravings and maps. Authors may include St. Teresa, Camões, Cervantes, Inca Garcilaso, Catalina de Erauso, Mendes Pinto, Bacon, Sor Juana, Antonio Vieira, and Margaret Cavendish. Students will practice close reading techniques and historical analysis, writing papers combining the two. Texts will be available in English.