Usually categorically hate Quora answers, but this excerpted bit is not bad:
‘Fiction’ or ‘non-fiction’ doesn’t help us very much, and ‘fake’ and ‘real’ help us less. In a particular work, the better questions are ‘what kind of work (genre) is this?’; ‘what truths might it be teaching?’. If nothing else, a little discipline with those questions might alleviate some of the pointless and misguided wrangles which recur with disheartening frequency.
I agree that, especially with hyperreal texts, the validation of “facts” is only one of many possible avenues of experience. And it may not always be the most useful, versus a more structural (or structuralist) approach. It may be that the references/relationships/re-arranging have a greater relevance than maybe more fluid factual/counter-factual inclusions.
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