Factual Fictions

Lennard J. Davis is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also serves Professor of Disability and Human Development, in the School of Applied Health Sciences, as well as Professor of Medical Education, in the College of Medicine.

"Nowadays, most readers take the intersection between fiction and fact for granted. We've developed a faculty for pretending that even the most bizarre literary inventions are, for the nonce, real. . . . The value of Davis's book is that it explores the hidden contradictions in a genre that, even in the age of Derrida and De Man, readers are inclined to take at face value." (Village Voice) "Factual Fictions is fresh, well-written, and often illuminating. Lennard Davis makes us see the novel as a text among other texts, an autonomous object determined by society's laws, culture, and technology as much as by the special qualities of its author and audience, and a reflection of that 'lost moment' when one might observe 'the unity of news, novels, ideology, history, fact, and fiction'." (Yearbook of English Studies)