&NOW 2018

This critical-creative panel will consider recent studies on the use of fictional narratives in socio-political domains in order to look at the predicament that literary fiction finds itself within a political and economic landscape that has become increasingly fictionalized itself. At a moment when fraudulent narratives increasingly exert magnetism over public discourse and policy decisions themselves, literary fiction finds its natural domain, the unreal world, colonized. By examining narratives that have been influenced by “spin,” propaganda, alternative facts, plagiarism, imposture, and double speak, we will try to localize mechanisms or strategies that offer paths of resistance through what David Castillo and Bill Egginton call “fictional awareness.”