Ekphrasis

I Awoke from A Dream and Brought It Into Being

Estimated Reading Time: 20 Minutes

It was in March of 2021 when I had the most vivid of dreams, enough that I sought to articulate it in 20K+ words within a few days, and some more to craft supplementary multimedia that captures what I have experienced. What I made might never substitute the real, but it fulfilled what I want achieved.

As in all my mornings, I have nurtured the habit of putting into my Notes app the images that have appeared in my sleep before it fleets from memory, which I equally find fascinating and weird! To dedicate a blog post in public now for others to witness what my 2023 self classifies as cringe in spite of those whom I confided about it finding it memorable is to share glimpses of an A Cask of Amontillado parallel where Montresor is a farmer and Fortunato is a chicken amidst a global pandemic.

At first read of that sentence, I would also find it strange and might even close the tab especially if I have other things to do, but the most graphic of dreams that escape to the living in waking share that quality, after all.

You may call my dream, The Conjugation of Truths. In all honesty, this blog post now deviates from what I originally planned to archive and write here, but beginning with a subject as niche as this allows me complacency to just write anything. For my friend, the dream-turned-narrative I had is, "reminiscent of Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Neil Gaiman, and Nick Joaquin at their finest", where I, "weaved a macabre twist of the classic, A Cask of Amontillado told in an atmospheric meld of the gothic and the probinsya while utilizing Twitter threads as its medium." I, she says, might have instinctively re-invented a new formula for storytelling in the digital age, and had pushed barriers on the confines of the narrator, the protagonist, and the readers.

What you will find below is an exegesis I consequently made a week after in April. An exegesis in literature is a critical explanation of the [narrative I turned into interactive fiction]((https://sites.google.com/up.edu.ph/the-conjugation-of-truths/home) that served as an instrument for me to further reflect. Who knew that institutionalized disinformation would become that relevant and revolutionary of a subject in critical studies in the Philippines a year later in 2023?

Introduction

The consistent emergence of mass media throughout history did not only transform the efficiency of our communication process with others. Since we have shaped messages to possess a more corporeal form through them, we have progressed to make knowledge accessible in print, imparted stories through oral traditions, documented heritage with photographs and the reel, encapsulated our fads, fancies, and follies with art and design, and have been able to preserve fragments of our being in the data of electronic devices.

I have since been in awe in how media continues to allow us a transcendence in transmitting messages across space and time while providing opportunities that preserve it and be retrieved for later use. I believe it is through these that societies realize their continuance. As we progress towards the 4th Industrial Revolution, the media only opens more possibilities to transform existing cultures, dismantle them, and even establish new ones (Khan, 14).

The philosopher Sophocles, however, reminds us that nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without a curse. When my internet connection is stable and I have the freedom of health and time to linger in sociomental spaces to explore learning past what is prescribed by the classroom, one of the manifold issues and subjects I navigate is the post-truth order. It is thought-provoking how the term has been around for years.

In 2004, Keyes characterized the post-truth order as a condition when the boundaries of fact and fiction blur into obscurity while standards that sought to delineate them disappear. What extends this concept is succinctly articulated by Mair, being the “deliberate fabrication of facts to underpin whatever narrative and agenda one is advancing” (3-4). It is in this world that we see a caricature of people intentionally choosing what realities they want to adhere. Nonetheless, this engenders a problem: if our realities are but a matter of choice dependent on self-determination, then the truth is only bound to what contends triumphant in the bedlam of other facts that contradict another.

In the status quo, the social fabric finds itself gradually and profoundly woven into social media platforms, especially for those with the privilege to have technology as a bridge, instead of a barrier for whatever pursuits they want perpetrated. For this reason, the accessibility provided by these spaces has made the manifestations of post-truth more prominent in daily life. Building from latter expositions on this, Malcolm further contours social media amidst the following backdrop: 1) because of post-truth, emotions have become more instrumental in meaning-making than objective facts; 2) truth is relativized in which the delivery of facts depend on the control and rhetoric of knowledge producers; 3) humanity is now relatively less remorseful when one is revealed to be misleading; 4) amidst the inexhaustible resource of information, we have become more polarized; and 5) the anomaly and trend of polarization and manipulation of facts led to the emergence of conspiracy theories (1-2).

Nuance, however, that the issue of disinformation and its impacts—being manifestations of post-truth—are not new; they have received extensive criticisms because the magnitude of its influence in disrupting post-modern conventions continues to be mechanized more than ever, be it in the domains of corporations, politics, and academia. One of the foremost concerns of disinformation include how it escalates conflict through confusion, how it degenerates public trust on democratic institutions, how it restrains the achievement of social cohesion, and how it aggravates the attention economy, bastardizing our capacities for deliberative contemplation on whatever we come across online.

Consequently, the curiosities I have from the anomalies emanating from more advanced information-sharing ecosystems and public opinion heralded by social media led me to the awareness that humans must inherently be a post-truth species; ergo, we mirror what we are to the worlds we acknowledge today, if that makes sense.

While I have sustained my fidelity to narrative theory in further refining this dream-turned-literary-adaptation, you would also come across in the interactive fiction that I likewise integrated relevant concepts and fields of study—as well as ideas from artists and thinkers—to cultivate a creative work that deviates from the rudimentary and from what unvarnished standards I have set in place for anything embodied I create. Throughout my progress of putting this dream into being, I have came across snippets of knowledge from the contemporary public intellectual and historian Yuval Noah Harari that significantly capacitated me to unravel the depths of post-truth further (while others reserve criticisms for the writings of Harari, recognize that I have cognitively matured and have become aware of the 'thinkers' space since the creation of this exegesis in 2021!).

For Harari, civilization progressed because of our distinct capabilities to construct and circulate fiction. In the grander scheme of things, our species show a trend that our success in cooperation is rooted from us engaging with fictitious narratives. As long as we adhere to these shared narratives, we are bound to observe the same laws. Hence, philosophies—both the political and the spiritual—and religion managed to unite millions in advancing belief systems, creative pursuits, and social organization, even if “we have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit” (204-206).

Therefore, we cannot isolate themselves from fiction and organize ourselves on the black-and-white essence of consensual dialogue alone because fiction is what allows us to make sense of the world; that is why the consistent dilemma of scholars is this: “Do scholars serve power or truth? Should scholars aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should scholars let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments—whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins or Communist ideologues—placed unity above truth.” (212-213). Scholars and authorities of public information and opinion wield so much power because they have the time to engineer facets of humanity.

My Process in Transcending the Dream into A Narrative

It is because of this fascination with post-truth and its apparent prevalence on social media platforms today that led me to foreground an intertextual integration of the concept from political philosophy through the unreliable metadiegetic narrator function that is inherent in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.

Theoretical inquiry has been interdependent with creative practice in the construction of The Conjugation of Truths and this exegesis. This piece empowered me with discoveries that steered me towards insightful actualization of ideas and creative pursuits, which contributed a state of relieving “chaotic uncertainty” to the dynamics of creating things. This is comparative to a Situationist site-specific performance method of “technique transient passage through various ambiences”, so to speak (Debord, in Corcoran 2010, p. 10).

I individualize Edgar Allan Poe’s short story through the embedment of narratives in tweets and the localization of the storyworld in an implied Twitter as its space of discourse. This choice allowed me a space for the implied author-image that is journalist Borbala Kuzmina—who is also a character in the narrative—to subsequently reveal and withhold her personal accounts of the events that constitute the narrative from a hospital, having been disseminated within single, fleeting tweets while being mimetic of the segmented and solitary flow of information of individual Twitter threads including its omnipresent media environment.

As it has been mentioned in the home page of the website that the experience of the story begins when one must go and click her archived tweets, I conveyed in the interactive fiction that the perusal of the archive itself is a nostalgic remembrance of what remains of her tweets at present; albeit it is not on the Twitter platform itself because it is now in a frozen virtual somewhere.

Through this, I conspicuously established a temporal juncture that the reader is currently perusing the experiences of Borbala Kuzmina from the present, instead of the past. This is further supported with the date and time stamps set on the afternoon of February 6, 2020. I deliberately drew inspiration to this choice in memory of the Early Internet’s Geocities, which preceded the rise of social media. The Early Internet’s Geocities had significant proportions of it deleted, if not archived into derision today.

On the other hand, the fragmented delivery of narratives on Twitter because of the established word limit likewise allows me to signal to the reader how to semantically distinguish the succession of incidents in The Conjugation of Truths, with only discordant narration to make it apparent that order is disrupted and subtleties within the inconsistent and unreliable metadiegetic narrator I cultivated out of Borbala Kuzmina is augmented. These manifest in calculated introductions of narratives distinct from the previous tweet albeit interconnected with the entirety of the story from purview, alongside the utilization of “+” to indicate continuance in accordance to contemporary Twitter subculture.

After reading Phelan and Rimmon-Kenan, I likewise decided to breathe life into the characters of my interactive fiction by creating narrative personas in accordance with the foundational characterizations of Poe while further giving depth to Montresor past his original characterization that is marked by malevolence to at least humanize him in my own story. My creative piece is further individualized by overshadowing Fortunato’s reincarnation as a trivial, dying chicken because I see his original character as insignificant in the literary adaptation I have fabricated and would not serve any meaningful purpose in the narration. These choices shall manifest through the qualities I delegate to my characters in the voice of their writing and audio-visual metarepresentational ‘source-tagging’ that characterizes the overall narrative further.

Consistent with my adherence to the space of discourse being archives of an implied Twitter, I manifested in the narratives of journalist Borbala Kuzmina the omnipresent media environment social media platforms have by exploring how these features would play out in shaping the retelling of her experiences. This is operationalized through the use of photographs of her scribbled notes and audio recordings of a fraction of her dialogue with Montresor accompanying the tweets she was publishing in the hospital.

Furthermore, I wish to share with you the guiding questions that grounded my creative process throughout the construction of the plot, the outlining of my thematic devices, the writing of my story, and the development of my website. While the following did not necessitate me to establish a concrete answer, these primarily served as conceptual guides when I get lost in the intricacies of my creative process:

How does power play between a narrator in dialogue with another character affect the retelling of an experience and or story post real-time?

How would the situation transpire when unreliable narratives founded on questionable or insubstantial evidence are shaped to become stories of facts by authorities of knowledge considered as heralds of truth?

How would the ongoingness of narratives in their original and prime form be sustained when each reiteration is affected by who the narrator is, how they deliver it, how involved they were in the story, and what linguistic elements he, she, or they use in disseminating it?

How do we reinvent and then scrutinize the challenges of oral tradition amidst a post-modern renaissance in new media technology?

Conversely, how does the ever-expanding evolution of media and technology contribute in regulating human subjectivity?

Instituting Enigma Through Narratorial Unreliability and A Discordant Narrator

I operationalized the creative piece to delve deep on unreliable narration because this is the narrative element that has been most visceral in Edgar Allan Poe’s original The Cask of Amontillado. It is only rightful, I thought, that an exploration of the unreliable narrator should mean I experiment with its function--even aggravate or moderate it--in compelling the reader to engage themselves with fragments of post-truth in social media through a tug-of-war of deliberately imposing facts and potential fallacies in textual markers they are constrained to make sense.

In The Conjugation of Truths, the narrator is Borbala Kuzmina, a foreign correspondent based in a tropical country for an international media company reminiscent of Vice Media with adequate proficiencies for languages spoken in the geographic location that set her experiences in the story. The development of the character through its name has been rooted in the intention to immediately and seemingly alienate the reader from the author-image and character of Borbala Kuzmina because even a translation of her name in English would yield, “foreign harmony”. In the early depiction of the character, I had the intention to both underlie social media troll-like qualities to Borbala Kuzmina and the oppressed-journalist-from-freedom-of-speech trope engaging with the hashtag, #WeWantFreeSpeech; however, I only chose to convey subtle implications of these at the very end of the Twitter thread.

Narrative unreliability was a theoretical concern that I ascertained should become apparent in the finished piece of The Conjugation of Truths because it has been one of the pillars of reason why I chose The Cask of Amontillado amidst the multitudes of existing literary works to adapt. I premised that this function would likewise allow me to intertextually draw associations to post-truth and would allow me to contribute in expanding the existing and growing expanse of knowledge and practice-based research on the many themes I integrated. Within the progress of producing my work, I have noticed contemporary research works that have likewise explored affiliate concerns.

Over the course of the semester, Phelan opened me to the awareness of the nuances in unreliability. His text allowed me to identify 2 types of narratorial unreliability: 1) one that is caused by having to relay insufficient information; and 2) one that is caused by being fundamentally wrong (222-38). The Conjugation of Truths constitutes misevaluating, under-evaluating, misreporting, underreporting, misinterpreting, and under-interpreting. The narratorial unreliability function manifests with the inadequate disclosure of facts that would otherwise furnish the concrete and complete story of the experience. This is driven mostly by the innocence and the scope and limitations of our author-narrator, Borbala Kuzmina who engages with the accounts of Montresor and Fortune Chicken’s past lives.

Since I also learned from Rimmon-Kenan that the key fundamentals of a narratorial discourse constitutes that the role of a narrator must comply in interpreting, evaluating, and reporting the events of a narrative unerringly, Borbala Kuzmina immediately becomes an unreliable narrator because she is characteristic of an outsider to the social class of the character she is in dialogue with, Montresor (101-102). Aside from this, her hindrances also include her insufficient language proficiency with the mother tongue of Montresor, her recounting of tweets publicized at a hospital, her outlook on the meaningless of her career as a journalist revealed in introspection during the early phases of the narrative, and her possible confounded perceptions of Montresor’s retelling of a convoluted past life that involved divine entities and surrealism.

It was also a point of interest to not intensify narratorial unreliability to an abnormal degree. I characterized this condition as when the function would already provide an impression that the author-narrator is spoon-feeding ambiguity to the reader because the subtlety on the other hand, I assumed, would enrich the impact of the unreliable narrator function further. The choice to be subtle and yet profound in employing narratorial unreliability opens the reader to enigmas they are drawn to navigate, nudging them to scrutinize if every detail and information they retrieve from the text is truth or untruth amidst discordantly added information.

Implications of Simultaneity That Emerged from Serendipity

Margolin propounds that the depiction of events occurring simultaneously but in a unilinear medium is problematic in narration because its scenic representation of pair and or more continuing activities or sequences of events is at stake. Margolin explicates that this has been a profound challenge for writers in traditional representation on paper because most often than not, it is confined and mechanized through the three identified formulas (2):

“Alternating block presentation in different successive paragraphs, chapters or even books of different concurrent processes or activities, the successive textual parts thus retracing the same temporal interval.”

“Repeated intercutting--sometimes with ever increasing frequency--between two or more simultaneous narrated actions or acts of narration.”

“Turning the text on the page from a one-dimensional object into a two-dimensional object operationalized by splitting the page into two or more distinct rows or columns running in parallel, each representing one of the concurrent activities or acts of narration.”

Moreover, the method of presentation is often intercutting in which the duration of a narration is in minutes and the other is, at most, in several hours where there is a consistent transition between inner to outer voices. When signals that serve the purpose of delineating texts are not pursued, the reader is given the burden of difficulties to acknowledge from each other. When concurrent speech performances of two or more perpetrators coincide but there is an unclear recognition of who is who, distinctions become non-viable; thus, instigating the textual effect of verbal overload and discord.

The choice to embed multimedia in an effort to further reinforce the implied Twitter platform of the narrative through its omnipresent media environment that allows storytelling with audio, emoticons, emojis, photographs, videos, and gifs birthed--in the long-run, I realized--what may be characterized as simultaneous narration in the subsequent segments of the story when I integrated audio and photographs that supplemented in progressing the story and accounts of Montresor to Borbala Kuzmina.

Because of these choices, I managed to cohesively and consistently drive the narrative in the accounts of Borbala Kuzmina while still being able to include the personal insights from Montresor emerging out of their dialogue in its almost-original form had it not been translated in English. Albeit it is true that the narrative became condensed with the confluence of spirituality, the struggle and strife of a country’s rural and lower class, mythologies and the magic and mystery they carry, as well as implications of an emergence and outbreak of a pandemic, all these integrations did not hinder itself from being represented in a concise, comprehensible, and clear depiction to the reader sans the narratological unreliability function in this light when scholars have feared the bedlam that would emerge from simultaneous narratives. Consequently, congruous to the fundamental narratological element that I wanted to foreground and associate to post-truth, the choice to embed audio and photographs of translated narratives from Montresor in the dialogue Borbala Kuzmina had that led to the creation of a simultaneous narrative incited me to ask the question until today I am still contemplating about: when a text has been translated from a language to another, how might the distinctions of cultural context influence the interpretation of unreliability?

The serendipitous creation of a simultaneous narrative further distances the reader from the original insights of Montresor because the lack of certainty from whether Borbala Kuzmina managed to inscribe all of them on her notes and if she managed to translate them to English as accurately as possible is unclear, which further complicates and supplements the unreliability of her Twitter thread. Despite this, the simultaneous narrative that has been achieved in the later part of the story transcends what difficulties of representation in simultaneously occurring events have been identified by Margolin earlier on. The implied Twitter environment I created had no limitations of a verbal medium that is unable to, in principle, project what temporal occurrences overlap relative to another series of events from the narrative.

Therefore, the surfacing of simultaneous narratives did not become a disorganized mess readers must clean themselves to attain clarity of what must be known from the telling of Borbala Kuzmina. Instead, this narrative element and how it interrelatedly strengthened narratorial unreliability, further immersed readers] in a mosaic of Borbala Kuzmina’s inner monologue and the environment she is in that is rooted in being planted in a completely new environment and the anxieties that thrived from it of being hypervigilant of Snatiago Montresor, his actions, the foreign sensations that came from his personal tale, and the lingering dread after his coworker got caught up in something that remained a mystery for her throughout the interview--but is emblematic of a public health crisis when contextualized further in global occurrences that plagued the world during February 6, 2020.

Metarepresentational Source-Tagging As The Progeny for World-Building and Sense-Making

What I find fascinating about the study of narratology is how it has been consistent in its development as a field in the humanities. One of its most memorable interdisciplinary fusions was with cognitive-literary theory. Consistent with the acknowledgement of this comment, I wish to highlight a thought-provoking notion of meta-representational source-taggings from Zunshine’s, “Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel” that were derived from evolutionary psychologists, Cosmides and Tooby. For her, meta-representational source tags serve as a guide to the reader on how they might interpret and derive meaning from the narrative because they signal spatiotemporal elements that structure memory. She argues that had it not been for meta-representational source tags, literary narratives would have no skeleton to structure itself from (28).

In The Conjugation of Truths, the vividness of the depictions of the story and the narrative that were weaved into words sees a flourishing of these source tags. I would even argue that without them, people of today would have difficulties comprehending what postmodernist fiction I created. An example of these markers include ‘February 6, 2020’ (time-specifying), ‘The land Montresor tills is a land at the helm of storms; when the skies fell to genuflect the visitation of the monsoon every year, the only debris Montresor salvages is the remembrance of the meaninglessness of it all.’ (place-specifying), and ‘a cultured man born into generational wealth’ (agent-specifying).

On that account, meta-representational source tags likewise provide spaces for readers to make sense of the content they are taking in. Through this, the literary adaptation challenges the existing conventions laid out by Edgar Allan Poe on unreliable narration by pushing the boundaries of fantasy and magical realism in the sense that magical realism is characterized by how the hyperbolic and the unnatural are normal. In my narrative, it too, is emblematic of magical realism, however, they are drawn to actively engage with navigating the storyworld and the potential truths and untruths they find themselves believing. The most direct example of this is the image of Borbala Kuzmina’s banned Twitter profile which may incite the reader to contemplate on whether she is a social media troll spreading disinformation or someone who has been rid of their freedoms of free speech, to name a few. The fact that the location of the narrative conveys more strength for the readers of The Conjugation of Truths to be reminded that they might have to be wary with what information they should digest because the source tag that is Twitter, being a social media platform, may have the capacity to draw out associations regarding fake news.

Because of this, readers of The Conjugation of Truths are bound to grapple against deciding whether the source tags are reliable or unreliable to warrant the consideration of belief, supplementing once again the overarching primary narratorial element of the original text to be unreliability. As an extension to these explications, one can further nuance how in my text there is a relatively less adequate number of agent-specifying source tags in juxtaposition to the prospering number of place-specifying and time-specifying source tags that adds to the enigma of Borbala Kuzmina and her narrative, even if she--at the beginning--had a depth of introspection that allows readers to be in close distance with her thoughts.

Consequently, I wish to point out my fascinations over the possible relationships and similarities of source-tags and hashtags since reading through Dawson and Kermani a few weeks ago provided me the lens to see hashtags as cultural artifacts that signal the context of a tweet with the potential to extend and enrich the narrative further just by its solitary presence of accompanying the text. Since it is derived from shared experiences, hashtags created to evolve as social movements, therefore, provide significant weight for the reader to make sense of The Conjugation of Truths. In the narrative, there was only one hashtag used--#WeWantFreeSpeech. February 6, 2020 was likewise the date when the hashtag, #WeWantFreeSpeech, trended in international media following the death of Dr. Li Wenliang to bare anew how the People’s Republic of China oppresses deviant behavior in public opinion on government response from the COVID-19 crisis, further supporting how interpretations of imagery and metaphors that drive the narrative depend on the way the reader reconfigures them for their own understanding (Dawson 6).

Motivations

Beyond bringing into being the dream, the purpose of my work is to create an original literary adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado as a modernized version of the story--so to speak--amidst the backdrop of magical realism and tropical gothic, touching on spirituality, the absurdism of life, the struggle and strife of the country’s rural lower class and print media industry, myths and gods and the magic and mystery they carry, and the beginning of a public health crisis through a pandemic. Thinking that the premise of my work is innovative in itself, it is through this creative piece that I hope to contribute to the ever-growing collection of narratives and stories that emerged within the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines.

Furthermore, I wish to expand the existing expanse of post-truth narratives, having been inspired to construct the narratives because of George Orwell, Neil Gaiman, Albert Camus, Olga Tokarczuk, Nick Joaquin, and Franz Kafka. I believe that the most pressing issue for social media and the Internet is the ever-increasing rise of trends that exploit our biological need for interpersonal communication accomplished with Machiavellian precision: through data mining and manipulative functionalities such as infinite scroll and push notifications that influence how we perceive the world, how we approach these perceptions, and how it curtails attention. For a country that is plagued by disinformation, fake news, and trolls that have placed icons in jail and debased their identities, it baffles me how there is so much opportunity to democratize what post-truth is to the masses; nevertheless, further scrutiny of the status quo allows me the remembrance of how much under-supported the humanities are, and how art and literature is still inaccessible as much as the technological advancements have liberated it from the ivory towers of elite-owned cultural spaces.

This creative exploration has allowed me to remember life amidst the monotony of the problems that have emerged currently in my personal life and in school. The creation of this story to transcend the narrative elements inherent of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado in a form revolutionary from the 18th century steered me towards an escapism from the troubles that confound me. I hope you, reader, would take delight in what I have written. I would love to hear your thoughts on these, too. This has been the first time since I last wrote something I was happy about, and the project--not to be dramatic--is a motivation in itself to further contemplate on the narratives that confound our lives outside the school, and how we might be able to utilize narratives for social betterment at scale and personal mental clarity. This piece has inspired me to at least contribute in developing the Philippine literary scene, even if I have no plans to become a writer as of date.

Limitations

Formalistically speaking, in literary theory jargon, I restricted in standardizing the language of my tweets to a voice that is casual over than what is verbose as presented in my interactive fiction because I still see it as a piece of literature and the retelling of Borbala Kuzmina through writing and multimedia was something I want to explore and find growth from. Besides, there are thousands of Twitter users who write in that same manner, too.

Moreover, it is for the purpose of clarification that I want to propound on why there are no comments from other Twitter users. The archive of Borbala Kuzmina did not extend its involvement to implied public insight because I only wanted to have her narrative voice in my text. The inclusion of these, although realistic, would aggravate the simultaneous narration function I have in my work and I had apprehensions that it would become too complicated for me if I delve further lmao.

Works Cited in This Exegesis

Corcoran, J. [Re]viewing Big Brother and [Per]forming the Real. 2010. Victoria University. 10.

Dawson, Paul. “Hashtag Narrative: Emergent Storytelling and Affective Publics in the Digital Age.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 23, no. 6, Nov. 2020, pp. 968–983, doi:10.1177/1367877920921417.

Harari, Y. N. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. 2018. Jonathan Cape. 204-213.

Keyes, R. The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. 2004. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Khan, F. R. Communication and Culture: Reflections on the Perspectives of Influence. 2012. Wulfenia Journal, 14.

Mair, J. Post-truth Anthropology. Anthropology Today, 2017. 33 (3), 3-4.

Malcolm, Dominic. “Post-Truth Society? An Eliasian Sociological Analysis of Knowledge in the 21st Century.” Sociology, Mar. 2021, doi:10.1177/0038038521994039.

Margolin, U. Simultaneity in Narrative. April 2014. Living Handbook of Narratology. 1-9.

Phelan, J. “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita.” 2007. Narrative 15, 222–38.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction. Contemporary Poetics. 2002. London: Routledge. 101-102.

Zunshine, L. Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and Novel. 2006. Ohio State University Press. 28.