On Secrets, Lies, and Fiction : Girls Learning the Art of
Survival Mallan, Kerry M. (2013) On Secrets, Lies, and Fiction :
Girls Learning the Art of Survival. In Girls. Texts, Cultures.
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Canada, Ontario, Ottawa. (In
Press) |MS Word 2007 (144Kb) | Administrators only | Request a
copy from author This chapter’s interest in fiction’s
relationship to truth, lies, and secrecy is not so much a matter
of how closely fiction resembles or mirrors the world (its
mimetic quality), or what we can learn from fiction (its
epistemological value). Rather, the concern is both literary and
philosophical: a literary concern that takes into account how
texts that thematise secrecy work to withhold and to disclose
their secrets as part of the process of narrating and
sequencing; and a philosophical concern that considers how
survival is contingent on secrets and other forms of concealment
such as lies, deception, and half-truths. The texts selected for
examination are: Secrets (2002), Skim (2008),