TF Colloquium: Nele van de Mosselaer (Tilburg University)

Nele van de Mosselaer: On Appreciating Ambiguous (Non-)Fiction

In this presentation, I discuss a specific type of narrative content that is hard to classify as either fiction or non-fiction. Examples can be found in reality television, TikTok videos, narrative memes, and documentaries on supernatural phenomena or aliens. Through a series of examples, I argue that this kind of narrative content appears not to be enjoyed despite its ambiguous (non-)fictionality, but rather because of it. I discern two categories here:
- Bullshit content, the proper appreciation of which asks you to bracket the question of its nature as fiction or non-fiction.
- Conspiracy content, the proper appreciation of which asks you to foreground and continually investigate and question the nature of this content as either fiction or non-fiction.