Books by Conrad Aquilina
Framing Fear, Horror and Terror through the Visible and the Invisible, May 2016
The haunted house, the ultimate ‘Bad Place’, is very much at home in the genres of the ghost stor... more The haunted house, the ultimate ‘Bad Place’, is very much at home in the genres of the ghost story/film and mainstream horror. Rumours of wrong-doing and regrettable histories survive even the ruins they dare speak of, and to speak about a haunting is to necessarily and reluctantly discuss lived space. Any ghost story in fact is a story about occupancy, a lived place and its ghost/s, now bereft but not altogether unoccupied (and therein lies the perversity of a ‘filled’ absence). This paper seeks to assess the ways in which narratives of haunted houses are essentially foregrounded by topography and architecture, taking at its premise lived space as being central to a haunting. Using the dialectical approach to space/place as found in Michel de Certeau, this paper redefines the concept of topography (space-chartering) in terms of character-appropriation (or the haunting) of space and how geographic/urban space further opens up into narrative space. Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) will be analysed to demonstrate how haunted houses narratives build, sustain and suspend terror through their topography. It will also be argued that occupancy, possession and the vying for haunted space are ambivalent in this film, and that ultimately, spatial interactions are political.
Open Graves, Open Minds: representations of vampires and the undead from the Enlightenment to the present day, Dec 2013
This collection of interconnected essays relates the Undead in literature, art and other media to... more This collection of interconnected essays relates the Undead in literature, art and other media to questions concerning gender, race, genre, technology, consumption and social change. A coherent narrative follows Enlightenment studies of the vampire's origins in folklore and folk panics, the sources of vampire fiction, through Romantic incarnations in Byron and Polidori to Le Fanu's Carmilla. Further essays discuss the Undead in the context of Dracula, fin-de-siecle decadence, Nazi Germany and early cinematic treatments. The rise of the sympathetic vampire is charted from Coppola's film, Bram Stoker's Dracula, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight. More recent manifestations in novels, TV, Goth subculture, young adult fiction and cinema are dealt with in discussions of True Blood, The Vampire Diaries and much more. Featuring distinguished contributors, including a prominent novelist, and aimed at interdisciplinary scholars or postgraduate students, it will also appeal to aficionados of creative writing and Undead enthusiasts.
Papers by Conrad Aquilina
Durham University, 2020
In an age of computer modelling, a traditional semantics behind the term ‘simulation’ and its pla... more In an age of computer modelling, a traditional semantics behind the term ‘simulation’ and its platonic associations with imitation or pretense has ceded ground to more versatile, if not opposite, applications of the term. This epistemic shift is evident in the way simulation has undergone conceptual and practical reconsiderations beyond ontology. This dissertation arose from this initial enquiry, and the belief that simulation’s mimetic strategies can be considered to authenticate, rather than replicate, behaviours of properties under study, with modelling being an essential representational but also poietic process suited to narrative world-building. Correlations can be drawn between simulation modelling and narratology. Models construct frames of reference for target systems through make-believe mechanisms which also validate their truth as fictions – a mechanism readily seen in narratology. Fictional worlds are more than mimetic narrative constructs; they are foremost, approaches to narrative phenomenology and simulation. The reader should feel or experience the textual world as possible, and if specific behaviour or affect is to be elicited, the narrative model requires strategies which sufficiently simulate if not the texture, then at least a mentally intelligible perception of that world. Simulation narratives thus place additional ‘writerly’ demands on the reader as producer rather than passive consumer of a text. Reading becomes a reconfigurative process (a form of mental re-writing) since the simulation of narrative requires the same imputation of laws and accreditation of behaviours between the source reality and target model present in scientific simulation. In turn, formal demands placed by narrative simulation translates into the need for functional, if highly synthetic, hypermimetic processes, where a secondary reality is augmented. This is especially suitable in cases where object phenomenology is to be prolonged for the sake of reader immundation or manipulation of the text
This essay assesses the claim that model structures have features in common with narratology and ... more This essay assesses the claim that model structures have features in common with narratology and fiction-making. It proposes that simulation—a form of modelling—is amenable to literary narratives which are hypermimetic, in the sense that their cognitive or material reception by the reader demands a phenomenology attained through the heightening of a mimetic secondary reality. Simulation models construct frames of reference for target systems through self-validating mechanisms, and the same is true of narratology. I specifically argue that the modelling of a world out of text, one which is written and read into being, needs to be discussed in simulationist terms. To an extent, narratives or entire fictional worlds, are modelled by an author and a reader since properties, laws and behaviours are imputed on the basis of tacit agreement and shared knowledge. Readers self-identify (or not) with the author's fictional world, and its constructs. A process of verification and validation...
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort proved to be auspiciously influential as in Greece he would witness a... more Joseph Pitton de Tournefort proved to be auspiciously influential as in Greece he would witness a classic case of vampirism attributed to a vroucolacas, a peasant superstition which would be assimilated by the Romantics a century later as exotic material for fiction. Tournefort’s account, A Voyage to the Levant (1702), is anthropological and critical, and dismissed such incidents as mania, ‘an epidemical disease of the brain, as dangerous and infectious as the madness of dogs’ (89). Yet such mania fed the Gothic imagination, and Tournefort’s voyage to the Levant served to transport the Greek vampire legend into British Romantic literature. Sir Christopher Frayling identifies several archetypes of the literary vampire; one of these, the Byronic, though born in that Romanticism, is still very much a presence in contemporary vampire texts. In this chapter I will show the evolution of the Byronic vampire as it mutated from its folkloric roots, as documented in the ethnography of the lik...
Argumenta: , 2020
This essay assesses the claim that model structures have features in common with narratology and ... more This essay assesses the claim that model structures have features in common with narratology and fiction-making. It proposes that simulation—a form of modelling—is amenable to literary narratives which are hypermimetic, in the sense that their cognitive or material reception by the reader demands a phenomenology attained through the heightening of a mimetic secondary reality. Simulation models construct frames of reference for target systems through self-validating mechanisms, and the same is true of narratology. I specifically argue that the modelling of a world out of text, one which is written and read into being, needs to be discussed in simulationist terms. To an extent, narratives or entire fictional worlds, are modelled by an author and a reader since properties, laws and behaviours are imputed on the basis of tacit agreement and shared knowledge. Readers self-identify (or not) with the author’s fictional world, and its constructs. A process of verification and validation, analogous to the modelling and testing of simulations, follows. I conclude this essay by proposing a model in which elements from simulation modelling are carried over to narratology to demonstrate permeation between both representational systems.
Schlock Magazine, 2014
... What redeems Penny Dreadful from becoming yet again a rather unimaginative and clumsy romp in... more ... What redeems Penny Dreadful from becoming yet again a rather unimaginative and clumsy romp into the Gothic omniverse that is Dracula is the way it reconfigures this master narrative within its heavy pastiche. Allusion is frequent, direct and often pretentious, but it works, and it becomes even more significant when one is aware of the intertextual and structural possibilities opened up when concepts, creations and characters from late Romanticism, the Victorian Gothic and Victoriana are conflated and brought into fortuitous co-existence ...
Writers have long been aware of writing’s promise of permanence, especially in the way it ‘docume... more Writers have long been aware of writing’s promise of permanence, especially in the way it ‘documents’ lived experience, lending a degree of legitimacy to now past and unlivable (unlived?) events and bringing back to life the defunct. Yet, if life can be actually ‘written’ of/about through the referential dynamics of word and world, one might venture that it could also be re-written, revised and therefore re-visited. Lying behind the concept of revisionism is the belief that writing’s potential for revision and correction is an element conspicuously missing from life. For novelist Chuck Palahniuk, ‘life never works except in retrospect. [Thus if] You can’t control life [then] at least you can control your version’.
It seems opportune for life and the living to be reincarnated in fiction and art, history and biography, yet it is worth reminding the reader that a life written may or may not be a life lived. Literary license controversially permits that which is now closed; a decision taken, an outcome impossible to reverse, an opportunity to even the scales, a way to bring back the dead – all staples of revisionist narratives.
Select historiographic readings from Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and McEwan’s Atonement provide crucial examples of lives rewritten or re-presented as lived time and memory are accounted for by the playful and often controversial inversion of the memorialisation or historicisation process.
Conference Presentations by Conrad Aquilina
This paper is based on doctoral work-in-progress and discusses the post-literary on the basis of ... more This paper is based on doctoral work-in-progress and discusses the post-literary on the basis of Callus and Corby’s (2015) grounding poetics of the countertextual as an “artefact [which essentially] challenge[s] and reconfigure[s] cultural givens and accepted notions of textuality.” I consider one example of the countertextual artefact to be ‘simulation’, “a process in which a model of any kind is used to imitate (some aspect of) the behavior of its referent” (Jeff Rothenberg, 1989). This definition, among others, can also be applied to narrative, itself a very particular form of modelling of actual or pseudo-referents. There is therefore much in common between simulation modelling and fictional world-building.
Yet, simulation is not without its paradoxes. Its use in technology today may have reconciled its ability to mimic existing systems (replication) on one hand while generating emergent behaviour (construction) on the other, yet from the standpoint of a pervasive neo-platonism, simulation’s mimetic strategies serve to produce second-order and ‘untrue’ copies which ultimately delegitimise their source (Jean Baudrillard, 1981). As with any attempt to describe the post-literary - is it what comes after literature? – and here we would be hard pressed to determine when literature ceases to be (read?) (written?) (understood?) – we are also forced to question what simulation has become today. Narrative-as-simulation may well prove to be one (countertextual) answer. In negotiating itself between mimesis (imitation) and poïesis (production), as well as between literature and “literature-plus” (Callus and Corby, 2015), simulation may well have opened up the text to new forms of re-presentation (modalities) and their reception.
I consider Jorge Luis Borges’s impossible cartography in his story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1946) to fittingly foreground these post-literary modes. Although Borges did not use the term simulation, nor explain how to achieve one-to-one scalar representation, his one-paragraph story is essentially an invitation to carry out simulation modelling. Borges’s story has been read, extrapolated and reconfigured through the many shifting perspectives of simulation, from Baudrillard’s semiotic analysis in ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ to Umberto Eco’s mathematical essay ‘On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1’ (1995) and, more recently in 2016, as an “absurdist thought-experiment” in the artistic installation of Sara Morawetz.
‘Life is what happens to [us] while [we]’re busy making other plans’, as Lennon once wrote in a s... more ‘Life is what happens to [us] while [we]’re busy making other plans’, as Lennon once wrote in a song of his, astutely reflecting that life and life-time are inseparable and irrecoverable, while the concept of time itself fleeting and irreversible.
Writers have long been aware of writing’s promise of permanence, especially in the way it ‘documents’ lived experience, lending a degree of legitimacy to now past and unlivable (unlived?) events and bringing back to life the defunct. Yet, if life can be actually ‘written’ of/about through the referential dynamics of word and world, one might venture that it could also be re-written, revised and therefore re-visited. Lying behind the concept of revisionism is the belief that writing’s potential for revision and correction is an element conspicuously missing from life, as the present hurtles towards an unpredictable future, while the past has been long spent. For novelist Chuck Palahniuk ‘life never works except in retrospect. [Thus if] You can’t control life [then] at least you can control your version’.
It seems opportune for life and the living to be reincarnated in fiction and art, history and biography, yet it is worth reminding the reader that a life written may or may not be a life lived. At the centre of this controversy lies the notion of literary license, or the ability of fiction to permit that which is now closed; a decision taken, an outcome impossible to reverse, an opportunity to even the scales, a way to bring back the dead – all staples of revisionist narratives. Contingent upon this postmodernist fiction are the questionable qualities of historical accuracy and authenticity.
This interpretation of the (re)written life focuses on the ways narrative revisionism of personal experience, lived time and memory is accounted for by the playful and often controversial inversion of the memorialisation or historicisation process. Revisionism is viewed in terms of a (dis)closure of events as ‘the real, the true and the told’ (Berlatsky, 2011) keep switching places in several removes. Select historiographic readings from Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and McEwan’s Atonement, all fiction employed to chronicle biography or history, will provide crucial examples of lives rewritten or re-presented.
The haunted house, the ultimate ‘Bad Place’, is very much at home in the genres of the ghost stor... more The haunted house, the ultimate ‘Bad Place’, is very much at home in the genres of the ghost story/film and mainstream horror. Rumours of wrong-doing and regrettable histories survive even the ruins they dare speak of, and to speak about a haunting is to necessarily and reluctantly discuss lived space. Any ghost story in fact is a story about occupancy, a lived place and its ghost/s, now bereft but not altogether unoccupied (and therein lies the perversity of a ‘filled’ absence). This paper seeks to assess the ways in which narratives of haunted houses are essentially foregrounded by topography and architecture, taking at its premise lived space as being central to a haunting. Using the dialectical approach to space/place as found in Michel de Certeau, this paper redefines the concept of topography (space-chartering) in terms of character-appropriation (or the haunting) of space and how geographic/urban space further opens up into narrative space. Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) will be analysed to demonstrate how haunted houses narratives build, sustain and suspend terror through their topography. It will also be argued that occupancy, possession and the vying for haunted space are ambivalent in this film, and that ultimately, spatial interactions are political.
In her 1923 essay ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’, Virginia Woolf grudgingly acknowledges Arnold Bennet... more In her 1923 essay ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’, Virginia Woolf grudgingly acknowledges Arnold Bennet’s claim that writers of her generation could not “create characters who are real, true and convincing”, their fiction being neither entirely accessible to the reader nor entirely novel in method. Incumbent upon them was the newfound responsibility of not resorting to using those tools that had only “laid enormous stress on the fabric of things” but seeking instead to recognise inconspicuous “Mrs. Brown in her corner”, an “old lady of unlimited capacity and infinite variety; capable of appearing in any place; wearing any dress; saying anything and doing heavens knows what”.
Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Brown” could indeed be allegorically synonymous with literature itself, with such allegory promising unfettered liberties for literature and whose protean nature would go through various significant moments of rupture and change in the next half century. These moments are characterised by literature’s response to its own structures, as it sought to unshackle itself from convention and delight in contra-vention, becoming more introspectively self-absorbed and occasionally outwardly deceitful but nevertheless still intrinsically bound to the real, a real (it is suspected) it can never fully escape nor forgo.
In this regard, and in questioning what makes descriptions “real, true and convincing” (cf. Bennet) my paper will attempt to show how in attempting to ‘realise’ a fictitious ‘Mrs. Brown’ or a real(istic) event convincingly through text, as text, the exigencies imposed by the poetics of realism remain exceptionally high, especially at the start of the twenty-first century, where the very nature of reality and the necessity of the real itself is interrogated in all disciplines, from philosophy to neuroscience. I will also raise the question of what is ultimately gained (or lost) when writers find it imperative to push realism of depiction and narration to its limits, and whether in this demand to satiate this desire for veracity and credibility, we actually end up in exposing a culture obsessed with the counterfeit and the hyperreal, the ‘more than real’ real.
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Books by Conrad Aquilina
Papers by Conrad Aquilina
It seems opportune for life and the living to be reincarnated in fiction and art, history and biography, yet it is worth reminding the reader that a life written may or may not be a life lived. Literary license controversially permits that which is now closed; a decision taken, an outcome impossible to reverse, an opportunity to even the scales, a way to bring back the dead – all staples of revisionist narratives.
Select historiographic readings from Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and McEwan’s Atonement provide crucial examples of lives rewritten or re-presented as lived time and memory are accounted for by the playful and often controversial inversion of the memorialisation or historicisation process.
Conference Presentations by Conrad Aquilina
Yet, simulation is not without its paradoxes. Its use in technology today may have reconciled its ability to mimic existing systems (replication) on one hand while generating emergent behaviour (construction) on the other, yet from the standpoint of a pervasive neo-platonism, simulation’s mimetic strategies serve to produce second-order and ‘untrue’ copies which ultimately delegitimise their source (Jean Baudrillard, 1981). As with any attempt to describe the post-literary - is it what comes after literature? – and here we would be hard pressed to determine when literature ceases to be (read?) (written?) (understood?) – we are also forced to question what simulation has become today. Narrative-as-simulation may well prove to be one (countertextual) answer. In negotiating itself between mimesis (imitation) and poïesis (production), as well as between literature and “literature-plus” (Callus and Corby, 2015), simulation may well have opened up the text to new forms of re-presentation (modalities) and their reception.
I consider Jorge Luis Borges’s impossible cartography in his story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1946) to fittingly foreground these post-literary modes. Although Borges did not use the term simulation, nor explain how to achieve one-to-one scalar representation, his one-paragraph story is essentially an invitation to carry out simulation modelling. Borges’s story has been read, extrapolated and reconfigured through the many shifting perspectives of simulation, from Baudrillard’s semiotic analysis in ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ to Umberto Eco’s mathematical essay ‘On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1’ (1995) and, more recently in 2016, as an “absurdist thought-experiment” in the artistic installation of Sara Morawetz.
Writers have long been aware of writing’s promise of permanence, especially in the way it ‘documents’ lived experience, lending a degree of legitimacy to now past and unlivable (unlived?) events and bringing back to life the defunct. Yet, if life can be actually ‘written’ of/about through the referential dynamics of word and world, one might venture that it could also be re-written, revised and therefore re-visited. Lying behind the concept of revisionism is the belief that writing’s potential for revision and correction is an element conspicuously missing from life, as the present hurtles towards an unpredictable future, while the past has been long spent. For novelist Chuck Palahniuk ‘life never works except in retrospect. [Thus if] You can’t control life [then] at least you can control your version’.
It seems opportune for life and the living to be reincarnated in fiction and art, history and biography, yet it is worth reminding the reader that a life written may or may not be a life lived. At the centre of this controversy lies the notion of literary license, or the ability of fiction to permit that which is now closed; a decision taken, an outcome impossible to reverse, an opportunity to even the scales, a way to bring back the dead – all staples of revisionist narratives. Contingent upon this postmodernist fiction are the questionable qualities of historical accuracy and authenticity.
This interpretation of the (re)written life focuses on the ways narrative revisionism of personal experience, lived time and memory is accounted for by the playful and often controversial inversion of the memorialisation or historicisation process. Revisionism is viewed in terms of a (dis)closure of events as ‘the real, the true and the told’ (Berlatsky, 2011) keep switching places in several removes. Select historiographic readings from Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and McEwan’s Atonement, all fiction employed to chronicle biography or history, will provide crucial examples of lives rewritten or re-presented.
Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Brown” could indeed be allegorically synonymous with literature itself, with such allegory promising unfettered liberties for literature and whose protean nature would go through various significant moments of rupture and change in the next half century. These moments are characterised by literature’s response to its own structures, as it sought to unshackle itself from convention and delight in contra-vention, becoming more introspectively self-absorbed and occasionally outwardly deceitful but nevertheless still intrinsically bound to the real, a real (it is suspected) it can never fully escape nor forgo.
In this regard, and in questioning what makes descriptions “real, true and convincing” (cf. Bennet) my paper will attempt to show how in attempting to ‘realise’ a fictitious ‘Mrs. Brown’ or a real(istic) event convincingly through text, as text, the exigencies imposed by the poetics of realism remain exceptionally high, especially at the start of the twenty-first century, where the very nature of reality and the necessity of the real itself is interrogated in all disciplines, from philosophy to neuroscience. I will also raise the question of what is ultimately gained (or lost) when writers find it imperative to push realism of depiction and narration to its limits, and whether in this demand to satiate this desire for veracity and credibility, we actually end up in exposing a culture obsessed with the counterfeit and the hyperreal, the ‘more than real’ real.
It seems opportune for life and the living to be reincarnated in fiction and art, history and biography, yet it is worth reminding the reader that a life written may or may not be a life lived. Literary license controversially permits that which is now closed; a decision taken, an outcome impossible to reverse, an opportunity to even the scales, a way to bring back the dead – all staples of revisionist narratives.
Select historiographic readings from Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and McEwan’s Atonement provide crucial examples of lives rewritten or re-presented as lived time and memory are accounted for by the playful and often controversial inversion of the memorialisation or historicisation process.
Yet, simulation is not without its paradoxes. Its use in technology today may have reconciled its ability to mimic existing systems (replication) on one hand while generating emergent behaviour (construction) on the other, yet from the standpoint of a pervasive neo-platonism, simulation’s mimetic strategies serve to produce second-order and ‘untrue’ copies which ultimately delegitimise their source (Jean Baudrillard, 1981). As with any attempt to describe the post-literary - is it what comes after literature? – and here we would be hard pressed to determine when literature ceases to be (read?) (written?) (understood?) – we are also forced to question what simulation has become today. Narrative-as-simulation may well prove to be one (countertextual) answer. In negotiating itself between mimesis (imitation) and poïesis (production), as well as between literature and “literature-plus” (Callus and Corby, 2015), simulation may well have opened up the text to new forms of re-presentation (modalities) and their reception.
I consider Jorge Luis Borges’s impossible cartography in his story ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1946) to fittingly foreground these post-literary modes. Although Borges did not use the term simulation, nor explain how to achieve one-to-one scalar representation, his one-paragraph story is essentially an invitation to carry out simulation modelling. Borges’s story has been read, extrapolated and reconfigured through the many shifting perspectives of simulation, from Baudrillard’s semiotic analysis in ‘The Precession of Simulacra’ to Umberto Eco’s mathematical essay ‘On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1’ (1995) and, more recently in 2016, as an “absurdist thought-experiment” in the artistic installation of Sara Morawetz.
Writers have long been aware of writing’s promise of permanence, especially in the way it ‘documents’ lived experience, lending a degree of legitimacy to now past and unlivable (unlived?) events and bringing back to life the defunct. Yet, if life can be actually ‘written’ of/about through the referential dynamics of word and world, one might venture that it could also be re-written, revised and therefore re-visited. Lying behind the concept of revisionism is the belief that writing’s potential for revision and correction is an element conspicuously missing from life, as the present hurtles towards an unpredictable future, while the past has been long spent. For novelist Chuck Palahniuk ‘life never works except in retrospect. [Thus if] You can’t control life [then] at least you can control your version’.
It seems opportune for life and the living to be reincarnated in fiction and art, history and biography, yet it is worth reminding the reader that a life written may or may not be a life lived. At the centre of this controversy lies the notion of literary license, or the ability of fiction to permit that which is now closed; a decision taken, an outcome impossible to reverse, an opportunity to even the scales, a way to bring back the dead – all staples of revisionist narratives. Contingent upon this postmodernist fiction are the questionable qualities of historical accuracy and authenticity.
This interpretation of the (re)written life focuses on the ways narrative revisionism of personal experience, lived time and memory is accounted for by the playful and often controversial inversion of the memorialisation or historicisation process. Revisionism is viewed in terms of a (dis)closure of events as ‘the real, the true and the told’ (Berlatsky, 2011) keep switching places in several removes. Select historiographic readings from Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and McEwan’s Atonement, all fiction employed to chronicle biography or history, will provide crucial examples of lives rewritten or re-presented.
Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Brown” could indeed be allegorically synonymous with literature itself, with such allegory promising unfettered liberties for literature and whose protean nature would go through various significant moments of rupture and change in the next half century. These moments are characterised by literature’s response to its own structures, as it sought to unshackle itself from convention and delight in contra-vention, becoming more introspectively self-absorbed and occasionally outwardly deceitful but nevertheless still intrinsically bound to the real, a real (it is suspected) it can never fully escape nor forgo.
In this regard, and in questioning what makes descriptions “real, true and convincing” (cf. Bennet) my paper will attempt to show how in attempting to ‘realise’ a fictitious ‘Mrs. Brown’ or a real(istic) event convincingly through text, as text, the exigencies imposed by the poetics of realism remain exceptionally high, especially at the start of the twenty-first century, where the very nature of reality and the necessity of the real itself is interrogated in all disciplines, from philosophy to neuroscience. I will also raise the question of what is ultimately gained (or lost) when writers find it imperative to push realism of depiction and narration to its limits, and whether in this demand to satiate this desire for veracity and credibility, we actually end up in exposing a culture obsessed with the counterfeit and the hyperreal, the ‘more than real’ real.