"The mist returns: a crash-course in metalepsis"

This epilogue to the volume is a pastiche of the genre of university lectures, mining autobiography in the service of metafiction. Playing with the conventions of realism, it undermines the stability of fictional time and space and uses unnatural narration to show rather than tell what metalepsis is and can achieve. It then zooms out of this space of play to formulate more ambitious claims about the historical forces that make stories impactful in the real world and to illustrate their capacity to cement the collective identity of KU Leuven as an institution. The resulting short story is an autotheoretical exercise in response to a work of biofiction published by Romanian writer Iulian Bocai.