Real fictions: fictionality, factuality and narrative strategies in contemporary storytelling

Narrative inquiry 2019, Vol.29 (2), p.245-267 https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.19025.bro

 Autor: 

1. Sam Browse, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, Owen Building, City Campus, Howard Street, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK; s.browse@shu.ac.uk; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8709-5468
2. Alison Gibbons; Department of Humanities, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, Owen Building, City Campus, Howard Street, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK, a.gibbons@shu.ac.uk; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8912-9350
3. Mari Hatavara; Tampere University, Finland; mari.hatavara@tuni.fi  

Abstract: “In the fiction of the future”, writes Raymond Federman in the 1970s, “the distinction between the real and the imaginary, between the conscious and the subconscious, between the past and the present, between truth and untruth will be abolished” (Federman, 1981, p. 8). In the late 1990s, Marie-Laure Ryan spoke of a similar “crisis” whereby fiction dominated to the extent that non-fiction seemed less real. Certainly, in today’s post-millennial and so-called “post-truth” age, the boundary between reality and fiction seems increasingly hard to distinguish: politicians spin stories; everyday reality in (social) media is invested in live narratives; historical events are narrativized in literary texts; fantasy as a genre is more popular than ever; and new genres – such as autofiction and fanfiction – blur the boundaries between autobiography and artistic creation on the one hand and referentiality and readerly reception on the other. This post-truth sensibility reaches beyond the intentions of creators and beyond the fabric of texts, impacting the way people live their everyday lives together with and inspired by the stories that surround them. For all these reasons, stories as tools for making sense of human action in situated social realities are today more important than ever. Stories are, for example, one of the primary vehicles through which politics is articulated and debated (Andrews, 2014). In a study on a large, public deliberative forum, Polletta and Lee (2006) suggest that those who identify with minority opinions, prefer using personal stories as part of their argumentation, and so tend to get a more favorable response from those who have a different opinion. Moreover, the spread of new media affects the affordances and constraints available in interaction and interpersonal sense-making. These new media narrative forms and the hybrid ontologies of post-truth modes of storytelling in the twenty-first century make fictionality a more pressing critical concern. Stylistic and narratological tools and models must keep pace with the complexities of these narratives in order to remain relevant and to adequately elucidate their formal properties, the interpretive processes they involve, and the experiential effects they generate. 

Idioma: Inglés 

Publicación: 2019

Volumen: Narrative inquiry 2019, Vol.29 (2), p.245-267

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