“Fiction is not the opposite of reality, it is the complement of reality.”

Algis Petlin, “Fiction’s Use in Enhancing the Narrative of African Current Events”

Petlin’s statement is a fitting epigraph for the 2022 volume of Writing the World, the Comparative Literature program’s anthology of outstanding undergraduate writing. In previous years, we have separated volumes into sections for “Analytical Writing” and “Creative Writing.” This year, we are struck by the number of contributions that blur this line in effective ways, such as Elle Whitehead’s attempt to enhance a public narrative in the way Petlin describes, Abby Bates’s weaving of personal and other narratives to comment on the multiracial experience, and Megan Langsam poetic commentary on Spike Lee’s Chi-raq. Categories like “Analytical” and “Creative” are made to be deconstructed, and in this volume we have decided to do away with them. It must be noted, however, that the volume contains excellent examples of familiar genres, including analytical essays by Alice Lan Zhang, Maximilian Vlock, and Sam Nichols and personal essays by Leela G. Ramachandran and G Ziegel.

As always, we hope that you will find this collection a thought-provoking and inspiring demonstration of how Comparative Literature students use writing to come to terms with our world.

The editors

Gennifer Dorgan, Juan Carlos Cabrera Pons, and Meenakshi Nair