"Mr. Todd is doing nothing more than playing a fictional role in a fictional presentation," Mr. Brill wrote.
Claims that Al Qaeda terrorists were not solely responsible for the attacks have a lively following on the Internet, including on YouTube, but the second episode of "Rescue Me's" fifth season, starting in April, may represent the first fictional presentation of 9/11 conspiracy theories by a mainstream media company (FX is operated by the News Corporation).
The film Shakespeare in Love (1998) plays amusedly with this idea in its purely fictional presentation of Shakespeare's torchy affair with a young woman named Viola De Lesseps, who was eager to become a player in a professional acting company and who inspired Shakespeare in his writing of Romeo and Juliet indeed, giving him some of his best lines.
In Saturday (2005), the model of Virginia Woolf's fictional presentation of a war-shadowed day in London in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) stood behind McEwan's vivid depiction of that city on Feb. 15, 2003, a day of mass demonstrations against the impending war in Iraq.
Regarding the Weasel Parade News, the spokesman says Bonoma wrote the "spoof without anyone's knowledge or participation at CIBC," and that Bonoma read the "supposedly comical fictional presentation" at the closing dinner where the investment bankers and one large investor were present.
In its aim to "enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality," The Spectator adopted a fictional method of presentation through a "Spectator Club," whose imaginary members extolled the authors' own ideas about society.
In France, as Michel Butor has pointed out, the new novel is increasingly performing some of the tasks of the old essay; in America, as Capote's In Cold Blood and Mailer's Armies of the Night have shown, the documentary report can gain strength from its presentation as fictional narrative.
Seven hundred recording hours later, Sgt. Pepper's was born in all its psychedelic glory, the Beatles' most audacious and inspired leap into the avant-garde: their self-presentation as fictional characters.
For instance, the movie may allow us to see how we are being manipulated by advertising into thinking that we desire the objects they want to sell us, but this critical insight is undermined by the fictional nature of its presentation.
The urbane presentation of Earl Derr Biggers's fictional Chinese sleuth, in print and in film, ran counter to the racism of his era.
