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Fiction or Reality

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Fiction or reality?

We know, that generally speaking nothing in romans comes out of thin air; there is a long tradition in literature of using real persons and events and turning them into fiction. Or as Virginia Woolf said: “Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners."
There was a time, where you could count on, that (ikke that efter komma. Måske “ conut on a book being either documentary or…”) a book either documentary or fiction, but that is not how it is anymore: now it can both be documentary and fiction, but thus also neither documentary nor fiction. This is the genre, the literary scholar Poul Behrendt has called ‘the double contract’, between each writer and his reader is an implicit agreement – an unwritten contract which has traditionally gone out that either everything in the book was true – something that had taken place in the(evt. Slettet) reality – or the opposite: everything was fabricated.
The double contract means that a creation easily can be fiction, a novel, but at the same time also has element which point at a concrete reality behind the fiction. (But) what is going to happen when you use real people – with naming names in novels? Can you write anything, as long as you call the text a ‘novel’? The lack of clarity between autobiography and prose, between reality and fiction, opens up new challenging opportunities for literature.

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