Difference between revisions 51574 and 71903 on enwiki

A <b>false document</b> is a literary (or artistic) device which attempts to create in the reader (viewer, audience, etc) a sense of authenticity beyond the normal and expected suspension of disbelief. That is, it wants to fool the audience briefly into thinking that what is being presented is actually a fact.

(contracted; show full)* <i>Emigrants</i> by [[W. G. Sebald]]
* <i>[[Museum of Jurassic Technology]]</i>
* <i>The White Hotel</i> by [[D.M. Thomas]]
* [[Dungeons and Dragons]] by [[Gary Gygax]]
* <i>Andromeda Strain</i> by [[Michael Crichton]] and the 1971 film.
* Most [[role-playing game]]s
* <i>Memoirs of Hadrian</i> by Maurgeritte Yourcenair


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* <i>I, Claudius</i> and <i>Claudius the God</i> by [[Robert Graves]]
* <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> by [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]]
* <i>[[Watchmen]]</i> by [[Alan Moore]]
* <i>[[The Princess Bride]]</i> by [[William Goldman]]
* <i>[[Book of Counted Sorrows]]</i> by [[Dean R. Koontz]]
* <i>[[Works of Kilgore Trout]]</i> by [[Kurt Vonnegut]]
* <i>[[Avalon Landing]]</i> by [[Sean Connery]] in the film ''Finding Forrester''
* <i>[[Dune]]</i> by [[Frank Herbert]]
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* ''[[The Grasshopper Lies Heavy]]'' "by Hawthorne Abendsen" 


False Documents in Theory
* <i>Boggs</i> by Lawrence Weschler
* <i>Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder</i> by Lawrence Weschler
* <i>Simulacra and Simulation</i> by Baudrillard

Hoaxes (are they art or not?):
* "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" <br>by Alan Sokal, Spring/Summer 1996 issue of <i>Social Text</i>). See [[Sokal Affair]]
* "The endochronic properties of resublimated thiotimoline", [[Isaac Asimov]].
* [[Ova Prima]]
* [[Salamander letter]]

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<b> Sources: or, False Documents as a field of study</b><p>
False documents were recently the topic of a graduate level seminar in the humanities at the [[University of Michigan]]. The seminar was taught by Professor Eileen Pollack. While the form has existed for at least two  hundred years, focused study is fairly recent.
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see: [[literature]], [[falsification]], [[frame tale]], [[conspiracy theory]], [[urban legend]], [[fictional guidebook]]
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[[talk:False_document|Talk]]