ENGL 5851 Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictive Art: Hoaxes in Contemporary Literature and Visual Art

This graduate seminar will explore the intersections of visual art, fiction, museum studies, art history, creative non-fiction, forgeries, and hoaxes. With a focus on contemporary and twentieth-century fictive art and literature, this course will examine the relationships between publisher, author, reader, and text (or gallery, artist, patron, and art) to determine how expectations around the authenticity and authority of cultural institutions affects our relationships to truth, history, and story. We will consider the often overlooked place and purpose of hoax, forgery, heteronymity, and trickery in studies of visual art and literature. We will carefully read, experience, and discuss contemporary works of painting, sculpture, photography, fiction, and poetry that question and explore ideas of authenticity, authorship, and the boundaries and borderlands of fact and fiction (including but not limited to Paul Kane, Edward Curtis, Emily Carr, Jeff Wall, Brian Jungan, Iris Häussler, Erin Mouré, Sonny Assu, Mark Kingwell, Anne Carson, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, and Antoinette LaFarge). We will develop critical and creative practices that examine and re-imagine the roles of museums and curators, the author or artist’s authority, and the place of readership, spectatorship, and (both political and artistic) intervention in the formation of art. This course will ask questions about the accuracy and authority of recorded history, the roles of historiography and museology in society and literature, and will address theoretical issues such as colonialism, feminism, globalization, and commodity in the contemporary arts. Alongside a major research paper, this course will include a seminar presentation, a fictive art project, and a public group exhibition and talk on fakes and forgeries.