Plenary speakers

dr. Alina Buzatu

associate professor, Ovidius University of Constanța

Fiction as Reality and Truth: A Conceptual Guide, Updated

Fiction is our most essential anthropological endowment—a point that becomes immediately clear if we try, even for a single day, to live without enriching reality through imagination, without relying on counterfactual or hypothetical thinking. And yet, for all its gifts—its enduring seduction in both older and newer forms—fiction remains burdened by worn-out definitions, too comfortable to illuminate much in today’s world, where the digital continuously generates hyperreal kaleidoscopes and, with sometimes unsettling ease, blends the registers of fact and invention.

My presentation, Fiction as Reality and Truth: A Conceptual Guide, Updated, begins precisely here: what, today, is fiction—when the conditions of visibility, credibility, and circulation of discourse have changed so profoundly? My intervention offers a set of theoretical clarifications, especially for those who have made the study of fiction their profession, by mapping the ways in which fiction produces reality while simultaneously unsettling, complicating, and refining the very idea of truth. If we do not treat the factual/fictional opposition as a frontier drawn once and for all, fiction emerges as a mode of imagination and expression that compels us to recalibrate the criteria by which we decide what counts as true, relevant, intelligible, or significant.

The conceptual guide I propose is but a critical reordering of questions: what makes a discourse fictional; what kinds of attitudes it solicits; what norms it institutes; what forms of knowledge it enables; and what kind of reality it brings into play. On this view, fiction reappears as a constellation of practices—practices of semiotic production, of regulating attention, of orienting imagination, and of managing belief—through which a specific kind of reality and a specific kind of truth become possible. For this reason, examining the nature and functions of fiction requires moving across several levels: its ontological work of instituting entities, scenes, and identities; its gnoseological and epistemological reach as a laboratory of the possible; and its problematological force in generating fertile interpretive tensions and alternative frameworks for thinking. These functions help explain why fiction can instruct without being a “manual”, persuade without being an “argument”, trigger moral responses without declaring itself “ethics”, and offer spaces for counterfactual testing without being “science”. In fiction, “truth” is not only what can be verified; it is also what can be seen, felt, and understood differently when we are placed within a particular configuration of situations, values, and consequences.

A twenty-first-century conceptual guide must be able to respond to the older questions that have shaped centuries of reflection: what sort of “things” are fictional characters, events, and worlds? Do they exist or not? If they do, in what sense do they exist? How can we speak about fictional entities, evaluate characters, and attribute properties without collapsing into the overly stark alternative that either “everything is merely language” or “everything is real”? In this respect, the relations between truth and fiction call for an approach that distinguishes at least three complementary registers: truth in fiction (what holds as a fact within the projected possible worlds), truth about fiction (what we can claim, with warranted accuracy, about works, their devices, and their conditions of production), and truth through fiction (what kinds of knowledge, clarification, or orientation we gain through fictional experience).

My aim, then, is twofold: first, to show that fiction becomes a form of reality insofar as it operates as a mode of cultural action—projecting worlds and instituting interpretive contracts; and second, to show that truth is redistributed and recalibrated according to differences in authorial stances and intentions, regimes of reception, and levels of predication—articulating what is true within the fictional world, what is true of the text as an artefact, and what is true of our world insofar as fiction renders it intelligible.

dr. habil. Lugossy Réka

associate professor, University of Pécs (Hungary)

 A house of many ways: The contributions of literature to children’s affective, cognitive, and linguistic development

Empirical studies demonstrate that early encounters with literature support children’s cognitive and emotional development while shaping their oral language, metalinguistic skills, and attitudes toward literacy. In EFL settings, these encounters function not only as literary experiences but as rich linguistic events, creating opportunities for incidental language learning, lexical expansion, and growing sensitivity to discourse and pragmatic norms. Despite their well-documented benefits, authentic stories are often confined to the “educational margins” (Egan, 1989) and treated as supplementary rather than essential. 

This presentation explores how systematic engagement with literature, particularly multilayered picturebooks, shaped children’s thinking, social understanding, and the development of their languages and identities.  Drawing on data collected in both formal and informal contexts, the presentation will discuss findings from (1) longitudinal observation studies conducted in EFL classes in Hungary and (2) a multiple case study examining young adults’ memories of childhood reading experiences.

The main themes explored include: 1) how multilayered picturebooks were integrated into young readers’ daily lives; 2) academic and social benefits of literary engagement; 3) the role of future-oriented scenarios, ideas about future selves, and agency, and 4) teachers’ beliefs and the socio-cultural context.