It has become an increasingly common suggestion that we are currently living in a ‘post-truth’ world, where
compelling storytelling has usurped the place of empirical facts in determining our shared social reality. The impression of
reality becoming endlessly mutable by storytelling is bolstered by the idea of narratives as mediators of human experience,
developed across humanities and social sciences, becoming part of a popularized post-truth discourse. In this discourse, stories
are viewed as tools for constructing the world, and attributed power to create their own truths. I argue that the challenge for
meaningful communication posed by this sentiment can be uniquely and effectively confronted in speculative storytelling, and
especially currently enormously popular fantasy fiction. By creating thought experiments in conspicuously fabricated settings,
fantasy stories highlight storytelling as a means for coming to terms with different realities – and provide their audiences with
tools for critically examining and challenging the post-truth discourse.
Alter, A. (2015, February19). For Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant is a departure. The New York Times. Retrieved from [URL]
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. (S. Glaser, Trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Berlatsky, E. L. (2011). The real, the true, and the told: Postmodern historical narrative and the ethics of representation. Columbus: The Ohio State UP.
Cameron, R. P. (2015). Improve your thought experiments overnight with speculative fiction!Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXXIX1, pp. 29–45.
Egan, D. (2016). Literature and thought experiments. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 74(2), pp. 139–150.
Habgood-Coote, J. (2018). Stop talking about fake news!Inquiry.
Hassler-Forest, D. (2016). Science fiction, fantasy, and politics: Transmedia world-building beyond capitalism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Huber, I. (2014). Literature after postmodernism: Reconstructive fantasies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hutcheon, L. (1988). Poetics of postmodernism: History, theory, fiction. New York: Routledge.
Hyvärinen, M. (2010). Revisiting the narrative turns. Life Writing, 7(1), pp. 69–82.
Ishiguro, K. (2015). The Buried Giant. London: Faber & Faber.
Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. London: Verso.
Laybats, C. & Tredinnik, L. (2016). Post truth, information, and emotion. Business Information Review, 33(4), pp. 204–206.
Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H. & Cook, J. (2017). Beyond misinformation: Understanding and coping with the “post-truth” era. Journal of applied Research in Memory and Cognition 61, pp. 353–369.
Mair, J. (2017). Post-truth anthropology. Anthropology Today, 33(3), pp. 3–4.
McHale, B. (2018). Speculative fiction, or, literal narratology. In Z. Dinnen & R. Warhol (Eds.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories (pp. 317–331). Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Meretoja, H. (2014). The narrative turn in fiction and theory. The crisis and return of storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Meretoja, H. & Davis, C. (2018). Introduction: Intersections of storytelling and ethics. In H. Meretoja & C. Davis (Eds.), Storytelling and ethics. Literature, visual arts, and the power of narrative (pp. 1–20). New York: Routledge.
Polvinen, M. (2018). Sense-making and wonder: An enactive approach to narrative form in speculative fiction. In Z. Dinnen & R. Warhol (Eds.) The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories (pp. 67–80). Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Rayment, A. (2014). Fantasy, politics, postmodernity. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Rochlin, N. (2017). Fake news: Belief in post-truth. Library Hi Tech, 35(3), pp. 386–392.
Roine, H. (2016). Imaginative, immersive and interactive engagements: The rhetoric of worldbuilding in contemporary speculative fiction. Tampere: Tampere UP.
Roussin, P. (2017). What is your narrative? Lessons from the narrative turn. In P. K. Hansen, et al. (Eds.), Emerging vectors of narratology (pp. 383–404). Amsterdam: De Gruyter.
Suvin, D. (2016). Considering the sense of “fantasy” or “fantastic fiction”: An effusion. In G. Canavan (Ed.), Metamorphoses of science fiction: on the poetics and history of a literary genre (pp. 381–444). Bern: Peter Lang.
Tolkien, J. R. R. (2006). On fairy-stories. In C. Tolkien (Ed.), The monsters and the critics and other essays (pp. 109–161). London: Harper Collins Publishers.
Cited by (5)
Cited by five other publications
Brady, Alison M.
2022. Towards an Existentialist Account of Teaching. In Being a Teacher [Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, 19], ► pp. 155 ff.
Shen, Anni
2022. Adapting Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant
. Adaptation 15:2 ► pp. 207 ff.
Shen, Anni
2024. The Hidden Ghost Story: Ishiguro, Ugetsu and Troubled English Belief. In Japanese Perspectives on Kazuo Ishiguro, ► pp. 109 ff.
Biar, Liana de Andrade, Naomi Orton & Liliana Cabral Bastos
2021. “MYTHS”, “TRUTHS” AND THE ROLE OF APPLIED LINGUISTICS IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY. Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada 60:2 ► pp. 455 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.