Author Description

The use of documentary is viewed as a gesture of split, as it places literary fiction between factual and fictional claims to truth (Riffaterre, 1990). In other words, the documentary claim to authenticity violates literary structural principles. As a result, the volume's first premise is the impact of the documentary pact (Foley, 1986) on defining literature. The emphasized referential function of documentary literature results in the constant crossing of the boundary between fact and fiction, which proves unstable and transfigures reality (A. Danto). The second premise is that 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc, and the end of the Cold War, can be viewed as a wide-ranging political caesura that not only encouraged the emergence of new documentary literary practices in Central European literatures, but also repositioned the boundaries between the literary and the documentary.