CFA: LMU-PU Summer Seminar - Lying and Deceiving in Poetics and Politics
Image: Georges de La Tour, Le Tricheur à l’as de carreau
Faking it and Making it: Lying and Deceiving in Poetics and Politics
LMU-Princeton Graduate Summer Seminar
Princeton, June 1-3, 2026
Organized by Joel Lande, Susanne Reichlin, and Carlos Spoerhase
Guest Participants: Christian Benne (Copenhagen), Nicola Gess (Basel), Albrecht Koschorke (Konstanz), Barbara Nagel (Princeton), Bailey Sincox (Binghamton)
Our seminar will ask what it means to lie—and what it means to tell the truth, when both are understood as cultural techniques rather than moral absolutes. When and how does lying become legible as a distinct act, and when is it indistinguishable from the ordinary fictions that sustain social and political life? How do aesthetic forms stage and test the limits of veracity? To what extent can the poetic lie serve as a mode of truth-telling, and where does persuasion turn into deception? We will consider figures who inhabit both domains at once—the poet, the demagogue, the confidence man—as cases through which the boundaries between invention and belief, rhetoric and revelation, begin to blur. By tracing the history of these problematics from antiquity to modernity, we aim to rethink lying not simply as the opposite of truth but as one of its most revealing doubles.
Room and board will be provided for the duration of the seminar; participants are responsible for the cost of travel to Princeton, New Jersey. Discussions will take place in English and German.
Sponsored by the German Department Princeton and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
