Fake and Fiction

No more hours spent fact-checking! At the halfway point of Donald Trump’s presidency, everyone knows that fiction has replaced the domination of facts in the guise of the fake. Literary studies, however – the authority on all questions of fiction – have so far kept a reserved silence. Now Thomas Strässle takes the bull by the horns. Every fake is a form of fiction, just as a novel is also fiction. But not every fiction is a fake. What has to happen to turn fiction into a fake? How do we learn to distinguish lies - the beautiful lies of literature – from the evil lies of fakes? This is the topic of Thomas Strässle’s major essay.