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Research Project

Fact and Fiction: Creation, Forms, Boundaries

2016 – 2017

Key Question

Project Summary

Why do humans create fictions, and what kinds of truth can fictions convey? How do we distinguish between fact and fiction, and what is at stake in this separation? This project convened a working group to advance research on such questions.

Research Team

Alison James

Alison James

Professor of French Literature, and the College 

University of Chicago

Alison James works on twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, with a particular focus on post–World War II experimental writing, representations of everyday life, chance and contingency in literature, and nonfiction narrative. What unites these interests is her enduring concern with ...

Larry F. Norman

Larry F. Norman

Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor, Romance Languages and Literatures, Theater and Performance Studies, Fundamentals, and the College; Department Chair

University of Chicago

As a specialist in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, theater and intellectual history, Larry Norman's work is driven by a concern with the dynamic interaction between texts and their aesthetic and historical framework. More specifically, Norman is interested in how individual works ...

Thomas Pavel

Thomas Pavel

Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, the Committee on Social Thought, and Fundamentals

University of Chicago

Thomas Pavel's teaching interests include the history of the novel, seventeenth-century French literature, twentieth-century French literature and intellectual life, as well as the interactions between literature and philosophy. For a list of his publications and more on his research, please visit ...

Jennifer Wild

Jennifer Wild

Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, School of Cinematic Arts

University of Southern California

Jennifer Wild is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Her book The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema (UCP, 2015) was shortlisted for the Best Moving Image Book Award by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation and received Honorary Mention for the ...

Project Narrative

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