Speaker
Description
Contemporary narrative fiction often engages with realities that do not exist in the empirical world, yet remain psychologically conceivable and emotionally resonant. These imagined domains, constructed through literary imagination, offer an expanded terrain in which human consciousness may explore and withstand circumstances too painful to endure directly. This study examines the therapeutic function of alternate reality in confronting personal and collective crises, as depicted in Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (2008), and Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023). In each of these works, the protagonists encounter emotional, psychological, or political breakdowns that render their immediate environments unliveable. As a response, they retreat into or construct alternate realities—symbolic spaces that sustain meaning and coherence amid collapse. While these realities are not materially verifiable, they function as psychological refuges that momentarily protect against fragmentation, disintegration, and despair. By tracing the imaginative processes through which these alternate realities are shaped, the analysis highlights the capacity of fiction not merely to represent suffering but to actively mediate and reframe it. In this way, alternate reality emerges as a literary and therapeutic strategy for engaging with trauma in contemporary English-language fiction.
| Keywords | alternate reality, crisis, trauma, literary imagination, Atonement, Man in the Dark, Prophet Song |
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| knayebpour@agri.edu.tr |