Recent developments of vastly different sorts, including climate change, globalization as well as the phenomenon of Alt-Truth, have combined to recenter narrative as a humanistic tool of knowledge production. Accounts of the rise of the novel have pointed out its invention of a new narrative type, a “formal realism” (Ian Watt), falling short of scientific objectivity yet carving out a distinct and compelling standard of truth (verisimilitude). The early realist novel established itself as a higher mode of truth-telling by combining facts and fabrication to speculate about possible people involved in probable events (Catherine Gallagher). Can fiction today, and narrative realism in particular, overcome its traditional limitation to history at the human scale and its traditional focus on human agents to express the interconnectedness between humans and non-human across scales of reality (Amitav Ghosh)? Can narrative be rehabilitated as a believable account after the postmodern challenges of power/knowledge and post-Truth?

Discussing contemporary postcolonial literature (Da-Rif), the emerging genre of the global historical novel (Falke), the emerging genre of the contemporary neuronovel (Kaup), and storytelling on social media (Caracciolo), the four papers of this session approach these questions from four different angles, each exploring narrative and fiction as a form of knowledge rather than as a mode of deceit.

In “Beyond Viral Exemplarity: Notes on the Value of Fiction” Marco Caracciolo discusses the “viral exemplum” (Maria Mäkelä) as an illustration of how storytelling on social media can favor responses that uncritically turn the individual protagonist into the representative of a broader category. This generalizing interpretation is typically grounded in unexamined ideological assumptions and facile emotions (which are algorithmically amplified by social media platforms). The question Caracciolo raises is: how can narrative resist that generalizing move to viral exemplarity, instead favoring more reflective forms of apprehension? Ultimately, he suggests, fiction may provide a better or at least more complete model of the value of narrative knowledge production than nonfictional stories.

In “Reorienting Realism: Contemporary Global Novels and the Institution of Historical Events,” Cassandra Falke discusses the reconfiguration of historical fiction at a global scale. Authors like Chimamanda Adichie, Kamila Shamsie, and Chang-Rae Lee write about events no one disputes the reality of (the Biafran War, bombing of Nagasaki, the Korean War) and that weave together local and global histories. They intervene in the cultural historical narratives surrounding these events with the aim of re-orienting the horizon through which readers contemplate them. Falke argues that a theoretical approach that takes account of this re-orientation need not be concerned primarily with conventions that create veracity and need not assume epistemological differences coincide with national borders, but may consider instead the process by which an event becomes world-shaping. She will use Merleau-Ponty´s concept of “institution” to describe the reorientation these novels work within already accepted historical reality, focusing on the bombing of Nagasaki and forced migration to America as instituting events for two characters in Shamsie´s 2009 novel, Burnt Shadows.

In “Claims to the Real: Critiquing Journalism as Neocolonial Discourse in Contemporary Postcolonial Novels,” Meghan Gorman-DaRif discusses new developments in postcolonial realist fiction. Realism has always been a significant genre of postcolonial literature, particularly for its political import in countering colonial discourse in early texts. She argues that contemporary postcolonial novels develop a realism with a different discursive target. Where early postcolonial realist texts center mimesis on countering colonial discourse, contemporary texts draw attention to forms of crisis in the postcolony to counter the neocolonialist discourse of journalism as the dominant form of knowing. She discusses two novels that feature journalist characters, Nurrudin Farah’s 2011 Crossbones, and Helon Habila’s 2010 Oil on Water, which interrogate journalism’s presumed status as the apex of realism, positing fiction as the more “truthful” in capturing the reality of the periphery in times of globalized crisis.

Postmodern fiction has accustomed us to associating self-reflexive uses of the toolkit of rhetorical and narrative devices with anti-realism. In “Enacting the Real: Repurposing Metalepsis in Tom McCarthy’s Remainder” Monika Kaup examines intriguing new uses of narrative self-reflexivity in the so-called neuronovel, which updates the novel of consciousness by incorporating recent advances in neuroscience. Discussing Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), Kaup argues that Remainder bends self-reflexivity back toward a reconfigured realism that overcomes the dualism of mind and world in an enactivist account that shows how minds and worlds are co-constituted in embodied action. The plot centers on metalepsis (an ontological transgression of boundaries, such as between make-believe and reality). In Remainder, rather than de-realizing the real, metalepis authenticates a simulation.