Fiction and Lies: the ASIFF/SIRFF Fourth International Congress

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
-Professor Eileen John (Philosophy, University of Warwick)
--Professor Pierre Bayard (Literature, Université Paris 8 - Saint-Denis)

From Plato’s indictment of the tragic poets as misrepresenting the truth, to Sir Philip Sidney’s famous claim in the Defence of Poesy that ‘the Poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’, to current debates about fictionality and factuality, the relationship between fiction and lies has been a focus of scholarly attention. Both fiction-makers and liars make things up and misrepresent the truth. But it is traditionally assumed that with fiction, the invention is non-deceptive. As Margaret Macdonald (1954, 170) put the point, ‘The conviction induced by a story is the result of a mutual conspiracy, freely entered into, between author and audience. A storyteller does not lie, nor is a normal auditor deceived’. Macdonald proposed that instead, fiction-makers engage in a non-deceptive pretence of assertion; but other approaches also distinguish between fictionality and deception, from philosophers who associate fiction with an invitation to make-believe rather than to believe to narratologists who treat fictionality as a rhetorical mode of communication that overtly signals fabrication. If lies are assertions aimed at deception, perhaps fictions are incapable of lying.

Yet a sharp distinction between fictionality and deception confronts numerous challenges. Scholars across disciplines have considered the many ways in which fictions can affect our beliefs, for good or ill. Even if fictions cannot lie in some technical sense, they can certainly mislead, insinuate, obfuscate and so on. Works of fiction may be instances of propaganda which misrepresent the facts; think of Oliver Stone’s film JFK (1991) or Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004). And the distinctions between the fictional and factual are under increasing pressure in the current culture of disinformation and ‘fake news’ – a category not so easy to distinguish from ‘fictional news’.

This three-day international conference aims to explore the relationship between fiction and lies from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, literary history and theory, narratology, film and media studies, psychology and cognitive science.