CALL FOR ABSTRACTS - ASIFF/SIRFF Fourth International Congress: Fiction and Lies
Send your submission before January 5th !
The Association for Studies in Fiction and Fictionality / Société Internationale des Recherches sur la Fiction et la Fictionnalité invites submissions on the theme of Fiction and Lies, for the ASIFF/SIRFF Fourth International Congress.
10-12 June 2026
University of Edinburgh, UK
Organization: Stacie Friend
Supported by the British Society of Aesthetics and the Scots Philosophical Association
Keynote Speakers
-Professor Eileen John (Philosophy, University of Warwick)
-Professor Pierre Bayard (Literature, Université Paris 8 - Saint-Denis)
From Plato’s indictment of the tragic poets as misrepresenting the truth, to Sir Philip Sidney’s famous claim in the Defence of Poesy that ‘the Poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’, to current debates about fictionality and factuality, the relationship between fiction and lies has been a focus of scholarly attention. Both fiction-makers and liars make things up and misrepresent the truth. But it is traditionally assumed that with fiction, the invention is non-deceptive. As Margaret Macdonald (1954, 170) put the point, ‘The conviction induced by a story is the result of a mutual conspiracy, freely entered into, between author and audience. A storyteller does not lie, nor is a normal auditor deceived’. Macdonald proposed that instead, fiction-makers engage in a non-deceptive pretence of assertion (see also Searle 1975); but other approaches also distinguish between fictionality and deception, from philosophers who associate fiction with an invitation to make-believe rather than to believe (Walton 1990; Currie 1990; Lamarque and Olsen 1994; Davies 2012; García-Carpintero 2013; Lavocat 2016; Stock 2017) to narratologists who treat fictionality as a rhetorical mode of communication that overtly signals fabrication (Walsh 2007; Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh 2015; Zetterberg Gjerlevsen 2019). If lies are assertions aimed at deception, perhaps fictions are incapable of lying (as some have argued, e.g., Mahon 2019; Stokke 2023; Marsili 2024; see Dixon 2022a; 2022b for a reply).
Yet a sharp distinction between fictionality and deception confronts numerous challenges. Scholars across disciplines have considered the many ways in which fictions can affect our beliefs, for good or ill (see James, Kubo, and Lavocat 2023). Even if fictions cannot lie in some technical sense, they can certainly mislead, insinuate, obfuscate and so on (for a detailed overview, see Fludernik and Packard 2021). Works of fiction may be instances of propaganda which misrepresent the facts; think of Oliver Stone’s film JFK (1991) or Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear (2004). And the distinctions between the fictional and factual are under increasing pressure in the current culture of disinformation and ‘fake news’ – a category not so easy to distinguish from ‘fictional news’ (Pepp, Sterken, and Michaelson 2023).
This three-day international conference aims to explore the relationship between fiction and lies from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, literary history and theory, narratology, film and media studies, psychology and cognitive science. Proposals may address fiction in general, or any historical period or cultural tradition. We also encourage studies of fictional works in a variety of media (including video games, comics, film, and television series).
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
· The possibility of lying in/through fiction
· Other modes of deception and dissimulation in fiction (in particular works, in different media, etc.)
· Fiction and fictionality as (tools for) propaganda
· The relationship between fiction and fake news
· Differing historical or cultural conceptions of the relationship between fiction and lies
· Representations of deception within fiction (e.g., unreliable narrators, lying protagonists, forgers)
· Fictions that (seem to) deceive about their own status (e.g., mockumentary), and more generally, questions of ‘framing’
Please note: There may be a conference registration fee (discounted for students) depending on the outcome of grant funding applications.
Submission guidance
· All submissions should be sent by attachment in Word or pdf to fictionlies2026@gmail.com by 5 January 2026.
· Papers: Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words, in English or French. Bear in mind that sessions scheduled for paper presentations will be 30 minutes (20 minutes presentation, 10 minutes questions and answers).
· Symposia: Proposals, in English or French, should be no longer than 500 words and should include a description of the topic/theme, the names/affiliations of participants and brief abstracts of the papers. Sessions for symposia will be 1.5 hours or 2 hours depending on the schedule and thus should typically have no more than three speakers.
· We encourage submissions from, and symposia including, members of groups underrepresented in their disciplines, including women in philosophy. Symposia in philosophy should ensure that the proposal follows the Good Practice Policy of the British Philosophical Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy (see bpa.ac.uk/resources/women-in-philosophy/good-practice). Please also take note of the BPA’s Environment/Travel Guideline Scheme (bpa.ac.uk/policies).
· Funding may be available towards the cost of arranging childcare for speakers who may require it. Please ask for details.
· Participants in the conference will be expected to become members of the Association if they are not already (www.fictionstudies.org).
Early career prize
The ASIFF/SIRFF will offer a prize for the best paper by an early-career scholar (doctoral student or scholar who has received their PhD within the last 3 years), to be presented at the conference. The winner will receive a monetary award of €1,000 (euros). If you would like to be considered for this award, please submit your completed conference paper (no more than 3,500 words/20,000 characters) to fictionlies2026@gmail.com by 28 February 2026. The article must be unpublished.
References
Currie, Gregory. 1990. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davies, David. 2012. ‘Fictionality, Fictive Utterance, and the Assertive Author’. In Mimesis: Metaphysics, Cognition, Pragmatics, edited by Gregory Currie, Petr Kot’átko, and Martin Pokorný. College Publications.
Dixon, Daisy. 2022a. ‘Lies in Art’. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (1): 25–39.
———. 2022b. ‘Novel Assertions: A Reply to Mahon’. The British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (1): 115–24.
Duprat, Anne, and Lavocat, Françoise, eds. 2010. Fiction et cultures. Nîmes: Lucie éditions.
Fludernik, Monika, and Stephan Packard, eds. 2021. Being Untruthful: Lying, Fiction, and the Non-Factual. Baden-Baden: Ergon Verlag.
García-Carpintero, Manuel. 2013. ‘Norms of Fiction-Making’. The British Journal of Aesthetics 53 (3): 339–57.
James, Alison, Akihiro Kubo, and Françoise Lavocat, eds. 2023. The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief. New York: Routledge.
Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. 1994. Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lavocat, Françoise. 2016. Fait et Fiction. Pour une frontière. Paris : Le Seuil.
Macdonald, Margaret. 1954. ‘The Language of Fiction’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 28:165–84.
Mahon, James Edwin. 2019. ‘Novels Never Lie’. British Journal of Aesthetics 59 (3): 323–38.
Marsili, Neri. 2024. ‘Fictions That Don’t Tell the Truth’. Philosophical Studies 181 (5): 1025–46.
Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh. 2015. ‘Ten Theses about Fictionality’. Narrative 23 (1): 61–73.
Pepp, Jessica, Rachel Sterken, and Eliot Michaelson. 2023. ‘Fake News and Fictional News’. In The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief. Routledge.
Searle, John R. 1975. ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’. New Literary History 6 (2): 319–32.
Stock, Kathleen. 2017. Only Imagine: Fiction, Interpretation and Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stokke, Andreas. 2023. ‘Fictional Force’. Philosophical Studies 180 (10): 3099–3120.
Walsh, Richard. 2007. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. 1st edition. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.
Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, Simona. 2019. ‘Fictionality’. In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al. https://www-archiv.fdm.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/node/138.html.
