The CounterText review : post-truth and the post-literary

Abstract

Unsurprisingly, the past year or so has seen the publication of a slew of books addressing the notion of ‘post-truth’. The two main triggers that have given impetus and urgency to discussions about post-truth are the result of the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump as US President. This, also, is unsurprising. The third ‘non-surprise’ are the various strategies that have been deployed by scholars seeking to make their diagnosis of the situation the final word, the most typical of which takes the form of arguments that try to show that the phenomenon of post-truth is nothing new – it can, the various claims go, be dated back to the rise of postmodernism, or to the nineteenth century, or to the statecraft of Machiavelli, or to Plato and the Sophists, or perhaps human beings have always been inherently ‘post-truth’, and perhaps that is no bad thing. Post-truth is, in other words, no surprise to the knowing scholar. Interesting arguments, no doubt, all of which, however, come straight and predictably from the Bloomian playbook of critical Oedipal misprision. It might be the case that one of these takes on post-truth is the true one, though that sort of simple resolution is seldom found (or expected) in what are, essentially, matters of interpretation.