“What is truth?  A moveable army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms” This aphorism from Nietzsche helps frame our approach to literature in this course, which traces key moments in the career of the poetic “I” in vernacular literature. We will open with a consideration of the original justification for poetry: that poets are gifted by the gods with special access to the truth, which they reveal through powerful metaphors and rhythms. The truth-disclosing powers of poetry licenses the creation of sweet and persuasive untruths, or fictions (…which some authorities object to as “lies”). But moderns quickly recognized the power and the implicit irony of poetic language and deployed it to their own ends. What do the fictions of Shakespeare, sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Maxine Hong Kingston and Gertrud Schnackenberg have in common? A deft sense of language, of irony, of metaphor, of metonymy, of consonance and of rhythm, certainly. They also take seriously the poet’s charge of deploying those tools to reveal the truth that may lie buried beneath the ideologies, conventions and institutions of the lived world at any given time. Emphasis in this course is on close-reading and analysis; since this is an advanced undergraduate seminar, students are expected to present regularly on the readings and frame questions leading to class discussion. Final paper: 8-10 pages of criticism and analysis.