First-Year Seminars 110BK - Books Within Books

From Shakespeare's plays within plays to Rowling's diary of Tom Riddle, from Velázquez to Escher, writers and artists have consistently embedded moments of self-referentiality within their works to raise representational questions such as the relationships between illusion and reality, between truth and fiction, between past, present and future time, between words and worlds, and so on. We will explore these and other paradoxes by examining a variety of artistic forms including poetry, stories, plays, painting, and film.

First-year students only, by placement.