CALL FOR PAPERS – ALETRIA v. 36, n. 4 (2026) DOSSIER: Boundaries of Fictionality in Contemporary Narrative (2000-2025)
CHAMADA ALETRIA - v. 36, n. 4 (out.-dez. 2026)
Editors:
Kelvin Falcão Klein (Universidade Federal do Estado Rio de Janeiro)
Ligia Gonçalves Diniz (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
Luciene Almeida de Azevedo (Universidade Federal da Bahia)
Submission deadline: March 04, 2026
Boundaries of Fictionality in Contemporary Narrative (2000-2025)
Responding to the claim that the modern novel “discovered fiction” (Gallagher, 2006, p. 337), medievalist Julie Orlemanski (2019, p. 247) questions the conflation of the “concept” and the “experience” of fictionality and proposes instead a “comparative poetics of fiction.” In her account, fiction emerges as a “demarcatory phenomenon”: we call discourses fictional insofar as they deliberately suspend any binding commitment to truth.
The definition of truth, in turn, is neither transhistorical nor ahistorical. Rather, it is constituted within interpretive communities, which establish its parameters in contingent and mutable ways and draw on languages as heterogeneous as history and common sense, philosophy and religious doctrine, science, or the performative efficacy of speech acts.
Orlemanski’s formulation thus preserves the modern distinction between fiction and falsehood or error, while leaving open the discursive contexts in which fictionality is negotiated. This elasticity enables us to reflect not only upon pre- and extra-modern experiences of the fictional but also, by extension, on the very conventions of truth operative within specific cultural configurations.
From this perspective, we ask: what does the contemporary proliferation of literary forms that unsettle the boundaries of factual truth—long considered the benchmark of modern fictionality—reveal about both the possibilities of fiction and the regime of truth in which we are situated?
In a related sense, given the emphasis on biographical and social realities as frameworks of present-day narrative practices, we inquire into what experiences may be curtailed by the relative waning of interest in narratives of invention.
Among other possible lines of enquiry, this dossier invites contributions engaging with theoretical perspectives on the contemporary status of fictionality, as well as investigations into:
- hybrid forms at the intersection of fiction and non-fiction: life writing, essay, chronicle;
- the presence of the “real” in literature and the arts;
- reconfigurations of the novel and the short story;
- practices that interrogate authorship, narration, and reading;
- dialogues between fiction, memory, and the archive;
- regimes of truth and fictionality;
- autofiction and authenticity in the age of the truth crisis.
