Factual Fictions: Narrative Truth And The Contemporary American Documentary Novel

The opening salvo of cultural theorists who move within the postmodern matrix may not bring anything new to our knowledge of the development of this field of thought, but it provides a strong theoretical scheme that sets up Flis' approach to interpreting the social construction and the sociological impact of the documentary novel. While I found the impact (or lack thereof) of the main literary heavyweights that feature elsewhere in Factual Fictions to be notable, it is the mapping of the documentary novel in Slovenia that will be one of the main things I take away from this text. While Flis states fairly that "literature is losing its halo of a prestigious medium of communication in the world" (2010: 196), the relevance of the genre and indeed Flis' study with regards to contemporary literature is evident if we consider the fundamental drive of these works.