Bohdan Tokarskyi
First-Year Seminar 65Z | 4 Credits (Spring 2025) | CANVAS SITE
Tuesday, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
How does one become oneself? What does it mean to be authentic? How does poetry express the very making of the (authentic) self? To address such salient questions, we will draw on works of poetry, philosophy, and critical theory: from existentialism to ecopoetics, from the Soviet Union to the US of today, from Emily Dickinson to modern Ukrainian poetry. On the one hand, we will explore different visions of authenticity, the concept that not only became a burning issue in the twentieth century (to the extent that the second half of the last century has been dubbed as the “age of authenticity”) but has also, as recently as 2023, been chosen as the word of the year by Merriam-Webster dictionary – unsurprisingly for the age of post-truth, AI, celebrity culture, and social media. On the other hand, we will examine how selfhood is expressed and constructed in poetry. We will delve into fascinating questions such as: What is the relationship between the author and the poetic self? How does the act of writing shape the articulation of the self? How does literature imagine and achieve authenticity? Can authenticity be constructed? Can AI produce authentic poetry? In this seminar, we will, therefore, reflect on the philosophical and poetic aspects of selfhood and interrogate the notion of authenticity, which not only features prominently in the study of literature but inevitably touches upon the life of some – many, most, all? – of us.