How fiction can change reality - Jessica Wise
Stories can change a person's point of view
Fiction shapes culture (ideas of class, marriage and gender, etc)
Examples: Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre etc
Terrains have change, new fictions think about new era based on current society
TED-ed (2012) ‘How fiction can change reality - Jessica Wise’, August 23. Available at: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/jessica-wise-how-fiction-can-change-reality (Accessed: 15 October 2019)
The Social Impact of Books
Provoked some interesting discussions about these hot-button topics on radio stations
Powerful fiction has changed society in the past
Cause confrontations with established societal hierarchies
Keith Oatley (a professor in the department of human development and applied psychology)
Stories create empathy for their lead characters
We identify with them, share their frustration for societal problems
Written in documentary style = factual feeling
Gow, K. (2012) 'How Fiction Impacts Fact: The Social Impact Of Books', Fast Company, July 12. Available at: https://www.fastcompany.com/1842370/how-fiction-impacts-fact-social-impact-books (Accessed : 16 October 2019)
Film: “It did not change the reality around me, but it did give me some new knowledge”
We thrust our psychologies into the stories that we create, and the stories that we create certainly inform the way we view reality.
Social change requires us to know the difference between our fictional heroes within their fictional contexts, and us within our very real contexts.
Roth, D. (2015) ‘Social Change in Fiction and Reality’, A. Daniel Roth - All These Days, September 8. Available at: https://www.allthesedays.org/writing/-social-change-in-fiction-and-reality (Accessed: 16 October 2019)
How can we account for the unity of total experience, which includes experiences of fiction as well as of reality and, often, a mixture of the two (as in historical novels, in political satires, etc.)?
That fictional characters are consociational systems of guises from the same pool.
Can we consider the fictional individuals as being composed of the same basic elements entering in real objects and persons?
Castañeda∗ H. (2002) ‘Fiction and reality: Their fundamental connections: An essay on the ontology of total experience’, Science Direct, July 4. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/
abs/pii/0304422X79900147 (Accessed: 16 October 2019)
( Directors take on relationship between fiction and reality)
Interesting point of views
Boundaries between narrative filmmaking and documentary become blurred in their own artistic practice
Reality and fiction coexist. There is no definite reality, or absolute fiction
Staff, (2017) ‘The fine line between fiction and reality’, tiff, September 7. Available at: https://www.tiff.net/the-review/between-fiction-and-reality (Accessed: 16 October 2019)
An age when the culture at large embraces fiction as never before as an accepted, even desirable template for experiencing the world
Gaming, social networks role playing, “reality” shows
Practice on a daily basis as a new way of imagining their own lives, identities, and leisure
Importance of representation in our society
Relate what we already have in common to this desired audience
Alduy, C. (2010) ‘Engaging Reality Through Fiction’, Arcade, May 15. Available at: https://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/engaging-reality-through-fiction (Accessed: 16 October 2019)
“Design is hope made visible.”
As technology expands what’s possible, demand will intensify for those who can propose what best to do, and why
Technology will enable humanity’s fiction engines to expand, diversify and transform our lived experiences.
Fiction as Reality
Jean Baudrillard - hyperreality.
We face a tempo of imagination-driven turbulence stirring ethical issues we have yet barely considered
Fiction as Birth for All
Benedict Anderson : Imagined Communities
That the nation state would not have existed without fiction
Utopias and dystopias provide guideposts for the future
Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Technologies enable us to make the fantastical real, but vision precedes possibility.
Visions, Stories And The Consequences Of Power
Fiction not only suggests possible futures, it also helps navigate change.
Wolcott, R.C. (2018) ‘Fiction As Future: Vision, Technology And Our Accelerating Present’, Forbes, October 11. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwolcott/2018/10/11/fiction-as-future-vision-technology-and-our-accelerating-present/#10df51626352 (Accessed: 16 October 2019)
Fiction and Art
26 essays on a wide spectrum of subjects
Fiction as a significant phenomenon in human consciousness, carries fiction beyond its mainstream confinement and projects its nature and function in many of our cultural exercises such as metaphysics, mathematics, religion, history, semantics and law -- projecting simultaneously how not only verbal art, but also all other forms of art such as pictorial, gestural, sonic and audio-visual, are also fictions of various modes
How are fictions employed in the sciences and the arts?
Attempted to produce a collection devised to shed light on humans' creative imagination in their encounters with the world.
Invite scholars from a number of disciplines to write essays related to fiction, "fiction" taken in a wide but rather indefinite sense, while leaving the contributors much freedom in their understanding of their roles
Sukla, A. (2015) ‘Fiction and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory’, Bloomsbury, Available at: https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/fiction-and-art-explorations-in-contemporary-theory/ (Accessed: 16 October 2019)
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