The Real in Fiction

September 2022

Edited by Anne-Laure Tissut

By bringing together two notions often deemed to be antagonistic, this project aims at exploring the intricate mesh of our relations with the world as mediatized by fiction―represented, reflected and analysed by fiction as well as questioned by it. Theoreticians, literary critics, a philosopher and an artist joined forces, not in the aim of bringing down the diversity of approaches and definitions to a consistent unity but on the contrary, to illustrate the limitless field of possibilities opened out by the conjunction of the two terms.
Several main lines of analysis are addressed in this volume : the fictional treatment of historical facts, the tentative fictional renderings of the irruption of events in the daily, when the real tears up the seamless fabric of the predictable, or again the literary forms and structures meant to promote illusion and the reader’s adhering to the offered fiction by blurring―or even erasing―the traces of the presence of the creator yet at the origin of said illusion
Through the investigation of the effects of fiction upon the readers’―or players’―imaginative configurations as well as upon the forms of their relations to the world, hopefully some of the specificities of the function of representation in literature and games will be brought to light.

Place and Post-Truth

19 novembre 2021

The emergence of post-truth is often construed as immoral in the political framework, echoing the long-standing moral philosophical debates on truth and veracity as universal values, and on the subjective assessment of harmful truths and ‘white lies’. A moral consideration of truth as an absolute norm has been seen as ignoring the fallibility of human reason, and suppressing the multiplicity of perspectives. Between the tyranny of truth as an absolute and the fraudulent ‘alternative reality’ generated by a general mistrust of facts, many seek a solution in a renewed commonality.

We wish to question post-truth and its precursors and contemporaries : lies, propaganda, manipulation and disinformation. We would like in particular to discuss the violent dimension of post-truth, the violent assertion that it is possible to become blind and deaf to objectivity, verifiable facts and universal values in order to promote a subjective truth.

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