“Know Literature, Know the World“: “A team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics claim that stories and their writers can do just as much as academics and policy researchers, perhaps even more, to explain and communicate the world’s problems. Fiction, they boldly venture, can be just as useful as fact.”
The artistic efforts and social effects referred to within the article are very much within status quo parameters. Still, the article is a useful reference for rebutting the continuous claims that fiction does not and cannot effect much in the world, and other such intentional or unintentional apology for the negligent literature of the oft criminal status quo. Typically, one can only go so far toward revealing the world and its possibilities in dominant realms. The result is a negligent, complicit, shrunken, unreal or fraudulent literature, enchained when not wielding the club outright.