The Politics of Fiction

This essay uses constructions of avowed fiction from modern Western literature and criticism (Erich Auerbach, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner) to question the sense of reality constructed by dominant social discourses that claim to be the mere expression of reality. Avowed fiction has in fact an “epistemological” privilege: it is not obliged to deny its fictional character. It must build and make visible these modes of presentation of situations and the connection of events that appear elsewhere to be imposed by the very obviousness of the real. In such a way it can better teach us the multiple ways of creating a sense of reality and their links with the forms of the social order.