What Lyric Poetry Shows Us about the Fiction-Nonfiction Distinction

Thursday, September 29, 2022
4:00 PM - 12:00 AM
Armstrong Hall 222

Presenter: Hannah Kim, Macalester College

Hannah Kim is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Macalester College. She specializes in Aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, and Asian Philosophy.

Philosophers debate whether lyric poems are fiction or nonfiction, but there's also a third intuition that lyric poems transcend those categories. What's behind this third intuition? In this talk, Professor Kim will go over some considerations for thinking of lyric poems as fiction and/or nonfiction and see what lessons we can draw from lyric poems being neither. Among other things, we'll discover the preconditions of qualifying as either fiction or nonfiction and learn when we are, and aren't, tempted to ask about the fiction-nonfiction status. Professor Kim will finish by offering a new category that might help us catch the kind of works that don't neatly fit into the current categories and provide a more nuanced account of lyric poetry as a result of the lessons we've drawn.

This presentation is sponsored by Philosophy Department and part of the Fall 2022 Colloquium Series.