Novelistic Fiction vs. Newspaper Reality, and How They Meet in Nation-building

What is it about?

At the level of genre, fiction and reality find their respective equivalents in the novel and the newspaper. Fiction as genre meets its opposite in reality as genre, that is, in nonfiction. And yet the novel and the newspaper are the two genres in which nations imagine themselves, according to Benedict Anderson’s theory of nationalism. For Anderson, the novel and the newspaper narrate worlds readers can easily locate in the extratextual world. Yet this world is itself partly created by the two genres. Using shifters such as “we” and “today,” the genres designate their own reception, which depends on their circulation: the nation is comprised of whoever uptakes the shifters. These shifters, however, not the two genres as such, are sharing the fate of nationalism in post-nationalist times.

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Why is it important?

Rethinks the relation between novelistic fiction and and journalistic faction by offering a new reading of Benedict Anderson’s classic theory of nationalism.