The Museum of Fiction:
Materializing Imaginary Worlds as Narratives
Call for chapters
Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence contains a free ticket to the actual Museum of Innocence the Nobel-Prize author created in Istanbul in 2012. Each room corresponds to a chapter but visitors who have not read the novel can navigate their way through the fictional love story between Füsun and Kamel as well as through Pamuk’s reminiscence of Istanbul in the 1970s and 1980s. The collection of genuine objects having purportedly belonged to Füsun, the lost love of his bright young character Kamel in the novel, were also displayed in other museums, sometimes alongside other works of art. First, in 2016, 13 out of its 83 showcases were exhibited in London’s Somerset House contextualized by facsimiles of the novel as well as Innocence of Memories, a film by British director Grant Gee to which Pamuk contributed. Then, in 2018, 29 displays were shown at the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan, after the Turkish author had declared his love for this collectors’ house museum in its golden book in 2007. This time, the selection was articulated with a video installation in which Orhan Pamuk “recount[ed] the sense of the extraordinary museum creation and illustrate[d] the tie with the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum”[1]. Imagined and developed at once together and independently, the novel and the museums are not only made of the same imaginary and material stuff but the exhibition itself becomes intermedia narrative material that can generate new stories when transposed into different spaces and combined with alternative objects and texts.
The narrative force and structure of exhibitions and museums is precisely the topic of The Museum of Fiction: Materializing Imaginary Worlds as Narratives. In this book we would like to map out the different ways museums and exhibitions materialize fiction or produce material narratives, a new turn in museology of which Pamuk is a case in point but not an isolated case.
After collective Books about the representation of museums in literature[2] and another on literary museums in the home[3] as well as special issues on the ways museums collect stories and invent narratives[4], the MuséaLitté research project shifts the focus and takes a close look at the literary turn of scenography and museography in museums and exhibition that materializes an experience of writing, of reading or of fiction in 3D. We invite contributors to discuss the way exhibitions and museums, whether explicitly about literature or not, function as narratives and analyze the fictional and literary devices and tropes they use, re-invent or design. What modes of address or reception do particular modes of staging produce? How materializes enunciative device, point of view or tone and to what effects? What features allow us to enjoy and make sense of a museum or an exhibition poetically? What allows an exhibition or a museum to be read as a poem, in the way John Britton noted about John Soane’s house which combined fragments of building into an architecture poem: “we perceive not merely the imaginative architect, but the poet” (Thomas, 41; qt. Britton, 6)[5]? Do not the Dennis Severs House in London, 14, Henrietta Street in Dublin or the Tenement Museum in New York City also affect visitors poetically as well as architecturally?
The purpose of this book is not to analyze the way historical, biographical or factual data is mediated or re-enacted in historical pageantry, literary tourism or literary heritage exhibitions, nor is it to describe how we read museums or exhibitions. The purpose of this book is to focus on those museums or exhibitions the very existence of which is literary in that they are narratives materialized in a particular space, building, architecture, layout, or collection.
We may consider with Florence Derieux that “the art history of the second half of the twentieth century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions”[6], that is to say a collection or a succession of items that, together, make up a discourse on a topic, and indeed expography has developed alongside museology. We would like to look at all types of museums (art museums, science museums, history museums, architecture museums and culture museums, house and artists’ museums, institutions and grassroot museums) and exhibitions (permanent, temporary, volunteer-run, traveling, or virtual) whether conventional museums or alternative spaces, with a similar shift in perspective, to see in what ways they combine with all types of narrative genres or strategies (poetry, biography, autofiction, adventure, drama, memoirs, children’s picture books, comics, hoax, caricature, pamphlet, quotation, etc.) to create material fictions about art, science, history, society or culture to mediate the knowledge or data they mean to convey.
Is this new museological trend a widespread, worldwide phenomenon?
Chapters may address but are not limited to the following themes:
· Fiction may be materialized as a narrative when an exhibition invites visitors to walk through a book or chapters or illustrated pages (see Il faut sauver le joba mena. Enquête à Madagascar, Aquarium du Palais de la Porte Dorée, Paris, 14.11.2023–24.08.2025; “Save the Joba Mena”, MUZOO, La-Chaux-de-Fonds, 02.04.2026–19.09.2027).
· Narratives may be embodied in architecture, as visitors walk in/through a story in genuine historical building or space, such as the Jeanie Johnston boat at the EPIC museum in Dublin or invented houses such as Dennis Severs’ House, in London.
· Contemporary or historical reality may be storified, weaving a narrative around a place, a character, an author, a way of life – 14, Henrietta Street (Dublin) / Sherlock Holmes Museum (London).
· Narratives may be told through the senses, materialising the imaginary through noise, music, smell and odours, touch, (cf. The Rebellion Gallery at Nottingham Castle; “Contes parfumés des Mille et Une Nuits”, Institut du Monde Arabe, 2023).
· Contributions may explore self-reflexive, meta-fictional exhibitions: fictional curator, (cf. “Regards”, Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris, 2022), fake archeological exhibition selecting objects with misleading labels (“Museum of Mankind”, The Vagina Museum, 2024-5; “Fake, Archives of lies”, Stapferhaus, Lenzburg, 2018–2020; “To you to do, my cute”, Sophie Calle, Picasso Museum, 2023). What role do print and oral mediation, performance or games play in the fictionality of a museum space.
· Museums can become a space that welcomes a personal narrative, or where a haunted presence is interwoven in nooks and cranies of the building – such as “Lettres à Camondo”, the display of the writer and ceramicist Edmund de Waal at the Musée Camondo, Paris, 2021-2022.
· Some of these walk-through narratives combine multimedia elements. What impact does this have on the keepsakes, fictionalized or otherwise creative catalogs sold in museum shops?
· When personal or collective exhibitions or museums are hosted in virtual spaces, online or in apps, or experienced in virtual reality, in what way is their digitality part of their narrative?
· The approach may be diachronic, paying attention to the evolution of imaginaries, narratives or voices displayed.
We welcome contributions in English about exhibitions and museums worldwide by academics or museum professionals.
Abstract submission deadline: 15 January 2027
Notification of acceptance: February 15, 2027
Expected publication date: winter 2027
Submission process: peer-reviewed process
Please submit your abstract (title, 500 words and a short biobibliography) to both our email addresses:
Anne Chassagnol: anne.chassagnol@univ-paris8.fr
Caroline Marie: caroline.marie.up8@gmail.com
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albano, Caterina (2007). Displaying Lives: The Narrative of Objects in Biographical Exhibitions. Museum and Society, 5 (1), 15-28.
Bedford, Leslie (2016). The Art of Museum Exhibitions. How Stories and Imagination Create Aesthetic Experiences. New York: Routledge.
Bennett, Tony (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge.
Chourmouziadi, Anastasia (2025). “Museums and Narratives from Grand Narratives and Objects Biographies to Exhibition Storytelling,” Museum Management and Curatorship, 41 (1), 127-142. https://doi.org/10.1080/09647775.2025.2467711
Colard, Jean-Max (2020). “For a Visual Literature”, Critique d’art 54, 9-20.
https://doi.org/10.4000/critiquedart.61956 .
Macleod, Susanne, Laura Hourston Hanks & Jonathan Hal (eds.) (2012). Museum Making. Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. New York: Routledge.
Nachtergael, Magali (2023). What stories are written in museums? Narratives, counter-narratives and the construction of imaginaries. Paris: MKF Éditions, coll. Les essais visuels.
[1]https://casemuseo.it/en/coming-soon-love-museums-and-inspiration-orhan-pamuks-museum-of-innocence-milan/
[2] Marie, Caroline & Anne Chassagnol (eds.) (2022). Museum in Literature. Fictionalizing Museums, World Exhibitions, and Private Collections. Turnhout: Brepols, coll. “Museums and Ideas” 3.
[3] Marie, Caroline, Anne Chassagnol & Sylvie Kleiman-Lafon (eds.) (2025). Literary Museums at Home. Exhibiting and Experiencing Literature Indoors. Turnhout: Brepols, coll. “Museums and Ideas” 5.
[4] Chassagnol, Anne & Caroline Marie (eds.) (2025). “Museum Storytelling: Collecting Sotries, Inventing Narratives.” Miranda 31. https://journals.openedition.org/miranda/64022
[5] Thomas, Sophie (2022). “The Self-Contained Museum: Romanticism, Collecting, and the Space of Writing.” Marie, Caroline & Anne Chassagnol (eds.). Museum in Literature. Fictionalizing Museums, World Exhibitions, and Private Collections. Turnhout: Brepols, coll. “Museums and Ideas” 3. Britton, John (1827). Union of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting…. London.
[6] Derieux, Florence (2007). “Introduction” to Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology. Zurich, JRP Ringier. 8.
