The Ethics of Fictional Documentarism: From the Historical Avant-Garde to Social Media

Abstract: This article presents and discusses a genre I term “fictional documentarism.” I define the genre as texts that mimic and/or, in other ways, play with documents, including their style of writing, but overtly signal themselves as invented. My main argument is that what makes these texts unique is their potential to pose questions with ethical implications that could not be posed otherwise. I argue that this potential must be sought in the way these texts problematize the possibility of documentation. Furthermore, I argue that the same kind of problematizing is central to new forms of fiction on social media today, and that, to better understand these, it may be helpful to look at fictional documentarism as it has developed historically.