I just can’t stay away from the truth/facts/reality thread these days despite swearing repeatedly to disregard it (analyse that!), and so I must point out that even William Gibson, a novelist, has people assuming that because he writes something, it must be fact. His blog post of yesterday details some of the many things he has not actually experienced.
I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
Norman
Isn’t it all part of the intellectual disintegration so rife in our post modern world? It’s there in our “anything goes” approach to language and logic. We find what’s really a form of literature being presented as History. Boundaries are so blurred in so many ‘disciplines’, that it’s unsurprising to find his readers making the sorts of assumptions to which he refers.
Jill
Yes, our confusion is very postmodern, isn’t it. Or post-postmodern, perhaps, we must be up to that by now.
On the other hand, there were apparently violent discussions in the 18th century about whether or not epistolary novels were TRUE or not. For instance, a Duke published all the love letters he received from a nun – but were they truely from a Venezualan nun or just his own fabrication?
Btw, I can’t remember the exact example, or where I read it, but I’m sure I read of an epistolary novel more or less like that, anyway 😉
Norman
I’d like to think there was a time we were beginning [however briefly] to make clear distinctions between imagination being presented in a realistic form, and claiming imagination as reality.
But isn’t there an enormous difference between attempts by the Duke you mention, to pass off bogus material, and an approach which can be seen as meaning all written material is “really” only one form or another of literature, so those 18th Century type arguments are no longer even relevant?
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