In 2016, the concept of "post-truth" - indicating any linguistic regime of discourse in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotions and personal beliefs - gained significant attention in academia, although now its very pervasiveness risks oversimplifications. This research tackles the multifaceted phenomenon of post-truth as a complex network where a whole set of communicative, literary, and technological issues converge and interact with each other. The recent appearance of ChatGPT and other Large Language Model (LLM) AI platforms generating "post-truth" narratives in competition with other discourses raises a number of philosophical, linguistic, and literary questions.Our research group intends to investigate the impact and effects of post-truth on literature, linguistics, and audiovisual studies across different geographical areas, to understand if and how these textuality-related disciplines can devise epistemic tools 1 / 16 and hermeneutic categories allowing for the creation/negotiation of strategies to understand and resist post-truth divisive tendencies.
One of the research’s main goals is to understand whether post-truth discourses have inescapably negative effects or could also have positive or reparative implications. In fact, as possible alternatives to science-denial and fake news, literary, audiovisual, and AI-generated narratives can be helpful by fostering political and epistemological awareness, as it happens, for instance, with climate change fiction, or environmental narratives in videogames that may be able to problematize anthropocentric assumptions of the players (Caracciolo 2022); moreover, social media can promote new ways of literary fruition (see Tore Rye Andersen’s 2017 analysis of serial fiction published via Twitter).
This project will proceed along two directions: 1) a synchronic exploration of a number of 21st-century relevant literary, political, audiovisual, and AI-generated narratives employed in the US, Canada, and the UK, with France as a continental counterpoint to the foundational (and, in fact, dominant) Anglo-Saxon attitude and language; 2) a diachronic analysis of the evolution, strategies, and reception of post-truth practices and linguistic strategies across a broader historical and geographical perspective. We will adopt an interdisciplinary approach that conceives post-truth not as a phenomenon that appeared in the new millennium, but as situated on a trajectory proceeding from a traceable past and directed towards a much unforeseen future - the development of an epistemological paradigm in Western history and culture that is currently being challenged.
Our research group, composed mainly of scholars of literature, linguistics, and translation studies, aims to tackle the multifaceted phenomenon of post-truth as a complex network where a whole set of communicative, literary, and technological issues converge and interact with each other. We will try to assess how interdisciplinary collaboration might improve our understanding of post-truth phenomena by possibly identifying some shared frameworks of reference. In contemporary planetary culture, where the nexus between literature and national identity is called into question in favor of forms of localization at the level of subnational entities, post-truth narratives may well be agents contributing to the coagulation of diasporic cultures and identities. Considering that any form of public communication has always involved lies and misrepresentation, the focus will also be on the audience's local and global reception of and response to these narratives.
More specifically, this project intends to investigate the impact and effects of post-truth narratives on literature, linguistics, and audiovisual studies across different geographical areas, to understand if and how these textuality-related disciplines can devise epistemic tools and hermeneutic categories allowing for the creation/negotiation of counternarratives for our times, to understand and eventually counteract the dividing effects of post-truth. In order to delimit the field of study, our research will proceed along two directions: 1) a synchronic exploration of a number of 21st-century relevant literary, political, and audiovisual narratives and linguistic strategies employed in the US, Canada, and the UK, with France as a continental counterpoint to the foundational (and, in fact, dominant) Anglo-Saxon attitude and language; 2) a diachronic analysis of the evolution, strategies, and reception of post-truth practices across a broader historical perspective.