Can we justify reading fiction to make the present less real? In our modern attempts to defend the practical value of fiction reading, have we overlooked how the practice provides a valuable form of under-stimulation, an inoculation against an illness-inducing reality?

There is no paucity of defenses that reframe the practice of reading fiction as prosocial, as a responsible engagement with the real. For example, many arguments remind us that literary representations, despite their fictional status, have the capacity to rouse us to good action.
Whether we read to engage or to escape reality, we continue to read fiction because it provides us with an experience that cannot be satisfied by other means. Additionally, as a cultural practice, reading fiction has taken on a quasi-spiritual aura; it has become a secular ritual, not unlike mindfulness meditation, that is robustly encouraged by its proponents. Why not read fiction to escape the real?


Jason Ray Carney is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English of Christopher Newport University where he teaches courses in writing, literary theory and the history of criticism, Gothic fiction, and popular literature. His academic book, Weird Tales of Modernity: The Ephemerality of the Ordinary, analyzes interwar pulp fantasy, horror, and science fiction; reviewing it, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts stated "Carney’s book is a valuable addition to the literature on its topic. It deserves a wide readership, and a prominent place in the scholarship of American fantastic literature in the early twentieth century." Carney's scholarship on the literature of the unreal has appeared in The Journal of American Culture, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and several other publications. Most recently, Carney was authorized by the literary estate of Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Elie Wiesel, to adapt his harrowing The Trial of God into an original opera (musical composer: Andrew Scott Bell). Carney edits the award-winning The Dark Man: Journal of Robert E. Howard and Pulp Studies and Whetstone: Amateur Magazine of Sword and Sorcery, and is the are chair of the "Pulp Studies" section of the Popular Culture Association. In addition to scholarship and editing, Carney is also a fiction writer and published his first anthology of fantasy fiction, Rakefire and Other Stories in 2020. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx