Revising Reality

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An exploration of the artistic and pop culture concepts of sequels, remakes, retcons, and rejects, this book applies them to the ways in which we understand, reinterpret and revise real-world history and current events. Novels, comics, films, and TV shows continue previous events (sequels), reveal previously unknown events (retcons), or restart events (remakes), and audiences can still ignore any of these revisions if they chose (rejects). But what if these revisionist tropes adopted by popular media now provide us with the essential tools and rhetoric for understanding the nature of the real world and how we discuss it? Deriving revision types from those present in fictional franchises such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings and Marvel comics, Chris Gavaler and Nat Goldberg apply them to events and debates in U.S history, politics, law, science and culture to explore how storytelling frames our engagement with historiography, metaphysics, society and current events. Covering case studies such as the reversal of Roe v. Wade, identity politics, the discoveries of Copernicus, memory, cancel culture, other supreme court rulings, revisionist history, critical race theory, paradigm shifts and much more, this book makes our perceptions of the world and their relation to an ever-changing reality accessible and coherent.