When Truth Is at Stake: The Case of Contemporary Legends

Carlos Renato Lopes

Federal University of So Paulo (UNIFESP), Brazil
Introduction
Unsuspicious moviegoers and pay phone users are being stung by HIV-tainted needles
strategically planted as a means of revenge or out of sheer cruelty. Club scene habitus
are getting doped at parties and waking up the next morning immersed in a bathtub
surrounded by ice just to find that their kidneys have been snatched by the international
traffic of body parts. Innocent fast food diners are being exposed to the risk of
contamination from all sorts of unthinkable ingredients deliberately added to their
happy meals. School kids are terrified of going to the school bathroom alone in case
they bump into the ghost of the bloody bathroom blonde (in Brazil, the loira do
banheiro): an ex-student whose unrequited love for a teacher led her to suicide on the
school premises. All-too-frequent cell phone users are suddenly fearing for their brains,
which might be exposed to the risk of long-term damage, or even cancer. Are any of
these stories commonly passed on mouth-mouth or via the internet true? Are we
justified in dreading them?
A bunch of myths, some might say. Another series of contemporary legends, or more
popularly named, urban legends1: these unverified reports of unknown origin, told in
multiple versions as having actually occurred in a social context whose fears and
aspirations they express symbolically (Renard 2006). A not so modern form of
mythology which does little but recycle, in the form of narrative, the same old fears and
apprehensions involving contamination, violence, death But is that all there is to it?
Are contemporary legends simply a matter of believe it if you will?

1 The terms urban and contemporary are both commonly used in folklore bibliography. But they both
present problems. The former has become popular partly due to the American scholar Jan Harold
Brunvands collections and encyclopedias published since the early 1980s. Some authors, however, reject
the term claiming that the stories are not restricted to an urban context. In turn, contemporary, the term
preferred by authors such as Bill Ellis and Gillian Bennett and ratified by the International Society for
Contemporary Legend Research which was created in the early 1990s (Fine 1992: 1) , could lead to
the false impression that the stories are always recent, when actually many of them are rooted in longlasting traditions. Still, in favor of this latter term there is the idea that any narrative is perceived as
contemporary in the time it circulates (Ellis 2001: xiii). I use both alternatives along this article but I
privilege the latter, despite its limitations.

In this article I wish to argue that such accounts are texts just as worth bringing into the
language class as the semi-fictional, semi-factual narratives that have become staple
didactic genres. My experience as a Brazilian teacher of English as a foreign language
to Brazilian students particularly those with a greater familiarity with Internet pop
culture shows that these narratives elicit a great deal of controversy and debate.
However, these tend to take place in a rather uncritical manner, since the discussion
often gets polarized into a dispute of whether the facts do or do not actually occur.
Not being able to move beyond this polarization, both students and teachers would end
up disqualifying the accounts, disregarding them as manipulative lies with nothing
about them worth learning, at best something to be entertained by.
It is my belief that a Critical Literacy perspective has a lot to contribute to these
discussions in the sense that it provides teachers and students with a practice through
which they are able to question their own naturalized conceptions of culture and truth. It
can help readers to think through the power relations, discourses, and identities being
constructed and reinforced through these texts (Shor 1999). And it may eventually lead
to reading those texts as embedded in broader meaning-making practices in which the
fear of Others in our social relations can take on many forms of which contemporary
legends could be one whereby received interpretations and stereotypes of alterity are
enacted. We might then be able to recognize that since texts are constructed
representations of reality and of identities, we as critical readers have a greater
opportunity to take a more powerful position with respect to these texts to reject them
or construct them in ways that are more consistent with [our] own experiences in the
world (Cervetti et al. 2001: 8).
In order to shed a light on and begin to question the assumptions that underlie the
commonplace discussions on contemporary legends such as I have been able to observe
in my own teaching practice in Brazil, I draw here upon some philosophical and critical
theory engaging the problem of truth that should allow us to understand why such a
debate is so pervasive. It is my hypothesis that by critically looking into this moving
force of the debate we may be able to better understand how and why such stories in
contemporary culture keep being reinvented, then spread and re-transmitted, over and
over, whether or not they are perceived as having actually taken place somewhere

specific, at some point in time. My focus will be, then, on this powerful if elusive
thing called truth.
When one looks at contemporary legends, one cannot actually avoid the issue of truth
that hovers over them. It may appear explicitly in the very proposition of the narrative,
in which the narrator claims she will tell something that really happened not to
herself, but typically, to someone known to someone else she knows. It may also be read
into the reactions of listeners or readers of such narratives in the form of incredulity,
doubt or perhaps just straightforward belief. And, to be sure, it may be detected in the
struggle of commentators who aim at establishing the scientifically, technically attested
falsity or at least, implausibility of such reports, no matter how plausible these might
seem.
I would join Foucault (1971/1996; 1976/1999) in the claim that every discursive
practice has the capacity to generate effects of truth which are more or less potent and
enduring. Such a possibility of the creation of truth effects in and through discourse
occurs due to an inescapable element that affects the subjects of discourse: the will to
truth. It would seem that the question of whether contemporary legends are true or false
cannot be answered adequately or at least not beyond a mere factual investigation in
terms of this one actually took place versus this one actually did not unless we
consider the fact that legends are transmitted within socially and historically situated
discourse practices in which certain programs of truth are at stake.
Speaking of programs of truth implies letting go of a traditional conception of truth
according to which a conscious, knowing subject, free from power relations, can accede
to a truth that is rational and universally validated. In the history of philosophy, one can
trace that belief in its most rationalized form back to Enlightenment with Descartes at
the forefront. It is only in the late 18 th century that this view began to be seriously
questioned; and later with Nietzsche, and throughout the 20 th century, it was
systematically challenged. A short genealogy of this reviewed approach to truth in
philosophy is what I set out to do in the following sections. For that purpose, and to
back my claim on the relevance of reading contemporary legends, I turn to two major
currents of critical thinking themselves discontinuous regimes of (philosophical) truth
which share the aim of deconstructing the belief that truth is one, unique and

transparent. Firstly, I examine Nietzsches and Foucaults views of truth as will to

power (and hence will to truth), and the pragmatist conception of truth as a language
tool, proposed more recently by Rorty. Secondly, I relate these two currents to the
concept of programs of truth employed by Veyne in connection to his analysis of the
different approaches towards myth.
Nietzsche and Foucault: Truth as Will
One of the hallmarks of Nietzsches philosophy is the idea that there is no truth as
transparent knowledge of the world as it is. He was opposed to the idea of a possible
apprehension of reality by means of language, since there is no single pre-existing (i.e
prior to language) universe of things to know. In fact, the German philosopher
proposed that we abandon once and for all any attempt of knowing the truth. For him,
we should give up on the idea that language is capable of covering and representing the
whole of reality a reality that is supposedly determinable and determinate and
whose truth we could unveil or reveal.
How does knowledge work, then? Nietzsche says knowledge is mans invention, that is,
it is not something which is absolutely inscribed and inherent in human nature just
waiting to be revealed. At its root, knowledge is the fruit of a will to power which
mines its object and seeks to annihilate it in all its menacing potential. It is as if one
needed first to reject the object only then to bring it back to ones domain, already
tamed, already molded. This implies that each and every form of knowledge, including
science and technology, becomes necessarily perspective, partial and oblique.
Thus, if knowledge, which is the outcome of a historical will, leads to what we call
truth, truth is, according to this reasoning, nothing more than the result of contingent
human relations to which we seek to ascribe universal status by means of a will to truth.
Nietzsches classical definition, proposed in the essay On Truth and Lie in an ExtraMoral Sense, perfectly synthesizes this thought:
What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and
anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have
been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically,
and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a
people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what
they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power;
coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no
longer as coins. (Nietzsche 1873/1977: 46-7)
For Nietzsche, then, truth is interested knowledge, the brainchild of a will which creates
its own opposition between true and false: its own effect of truth. It appears in the
fashion of arbitrary metaphors, which are nonetheless made to become literal, taking on a
conventional and naturalized form throughout history. The original intuitive metaphors
are therefore taken for the things themselves.
But man forgets it. He forgets that he has created his own truths, since he has built
himself and things within a paradigm of rationality. He believes that he builds up from an

essence and that language serves merely as a transparent conduit for that essence. He
believes that he can look into the real from the outside. And that is what allows him to
think of science and philosophy in terms of discovery of truths. As Arrojo observes, the
perspective proposed by Nietzsche points to the conclusion that man does not discover
truths independently from his will to power or his survival instinct; he rather produces
meanings and hence knowledge which is established through the conventions that
discipline man in social groups (Arrojo 1992: 54, my translation).
The production of solid and naturalized meanings, however, does not take place on a
rational dimension only; it also occurs in mans relation with myth and art. Man allows
himself to be tricked by the illusion of finding an ever-reinvented, particular form of
relating to the world of dreams. As long as it does not cause him any visible harm, he
will be charmed when he listens to epic tales being told as true, when he sees an actor
play a king more regally than the king himself and, why not say it adding an example
to the ones Nietzsche proposes , when receiving and transmitting urban legends over
the Internet.
The Nietzschean notion that truth does not exist as a pre-existing absolute fact of reality,
but that it may exist as an effect even if necessarily illusory points to the utilitarian
nature of truth. Nietzsche claims that knowledge, inasmuch as it presents itself as a set of
truthful and reliable beliefs, may serve certain purposes, but not others, and that certain
things can be described as useful to certain kinds of people but not to others. This only
reinforces the authors refusal of the idea of truth as correspondence. Rather than
corresponding to a factual reality existing outside language and independent of human
beings, truth as conceived by Nietzsche is a cultural construction, a way of meeting
human desires, needs and uncertainties. As such, it is a value.
If for Nietzsche every form of knowledge and, consequently, every form of truth is
necessarily a perspective, it becomes impossible to aspire to an absolute and final
apprehension of reality. As Mos summarizes: by affirming that truth is a value,
Nietzsche wishes to desacralize this evaluative principle, revealing its condition as a
human invention: truth is an idea, a construct of thought, it has a history (Mos 2005:
31). It is, therefore, inescapably partial.
Directly influenced by Nietzsche, Foucault finds here the inspiration for one of his most
fundamental themes: the relation of interdependence between power and knowledge.
According to Foucault (1971/1996: 13-21), truth is an important external exclusionary
procedure in the order of discourse which operates by means of the true/false opposition.
When one looks into a discourse, at the level of the sentence or proposition, such an
opposition is neither arbitrary nor violent. It does not vary, either: the proposition is
always true or always false. But when it comes to identifying what has been, historically,
the will to truth that pervades our discourses and what sort of separation rules them, then
truth presents itself as a historical and institutionally sustained system of exclusion.
Major transformations which our societies have undergone over the centuries, including
scientific discoveries, can, to a certain extent, be interpreted as being the result of always
new wills to truth which were gradually imposed on a number of institutional practices,
such as pedagogy, empirical research, or the exploitation of technological resources.
But something peculiar occurs with discourses of truth: by presenting themselves as
freed from desire and power, they simply cannot recognize the will to truth that pervades

them; that is, in order to establish themselves as true, these discourses cannot help but
hide the fact that they are products of the will to truth. Thus, what we are allowed to see
is a truth that is rich and fertile, a sweet and insidiously universal force, and not the
prodigious machinery designed to exclude all those who, time after time in our history,
have tried to evade that will to truth and to question it against truth (Foucault
1971/1996: 20, my translation).
Truth is not produced as an autonomous error-free entity, hovering above human errancy,
independent from the institutional mechanisms of social action and control, or from
human desire. Truth is inextricably attached to those mechanisms and, therefore, to
power. Foucault reminds us that in any society the multiple power relations which
characterize the social body cannot be established or function outside a regime of truth,
that is, without being sustained by discourses of truth. In the authors words:
There is no exerting of power without a certain economy of discourses of
truth which function in, from, and through that power. We are subjected by
power to the production of truth, and we can only exert power by
producing truth. (...) After all, we are judged, condemned, classified,
obliged to duties, destined to a certain way of living or to a certain way of
dying as a result of discourses of truth that carry with them specific power
effects, truth effects. (Foucault 1976/1999: 28-9, my translation)
Foucault concludes that the will to truth, originated from the historically constructed
division between right and wrong, or true and false, is nothing more than the
exclusionary will to power. True discourse is no more than a necessary illusion on the
basis of which social subjects struggle for power. And it is important to understand that
this struggle takes place from inside the very discursive practice: we cannot reach the
truth, for we are always-already assigned a circumscribed subject position the moment
we enter discourse, the moment we are assigned a social position in our communities.
The author proposes that in order to analyze the will to power (and knowledge) in
discourse we must gradually build and define our analytical tools in a practice he calls
genealogical. This is done in keeping with demands and possibilities designed by
concrete, contextualized studies (Foucault 1997). Bringing our object of study into this
perspective, I believe we ought to better investigate and understand how the discursive
practices around contemporary legends point to the issue of the truthfulness versus
falsehood of the stories as being the key to those legends as if the narratives depended
exclusively on scientific-objective verdicts in order for validation. Such an
investigation would imply the analysis of the discursive practices which produce these
narratives in their local knowledge dimension.

On Internet discussion lists dedicated to the transmission and discussion of

contemporary legends2, a great number of posts refer specifically to the issue of truth
in/of/around the legends. Different interlocutors often struggle, by means of
argumentation and supposedly legitimate scientific references, to debunk the rumors or
proto-legends and re-establish the factual order as soon as these narratives hit their email boxes. It is as if to prove the stories false were the very raison dtre of such
narrative practices: the moving force of the debate. Indeed, one must carefully
examine how those narratives build on the tension between the local, discontinuous (in
Foucaults terms) and unverified knowledge, on the one hand, and the hierarchical force
of true knowledge on the other true knowledge which, once available to all by means
of the rational-logical apparatus of science, is taken as something revealed or
explained by the discourse of those select few who possess it.
One must not lose track, however, of Foucaults reminder that there does not exist a
simple division between accepted and excluded discourses, or between dominant and
dominated discourses. There is no discourse of power on the one hand, and discourse
against power on the other. Rather, in a given discursive practice, we often observe a corelation of forces, a multiplicity of different power/knowledge strategies that co-exist.
And it is this distribution of forces which is to be detected in the analysis: the play
between the things that are said and those that are unsaid or banned from discourse; the
variables and distinct effects depend on who speaks, when, from which
subjective/power position, and within which institutional context.
Rorty and the Pragmatist Approach to Truth
For pragmatists knowledge is a tool, an instrument that must be put to the service of the
conditions of experience. One of the basic principles of pragmatism shared by its
major representatives, from William James to Richard Rorty, with John Dewey and
Donald Davidson in between is anti-representationalism: the idea that there is not a
world out there, a reality independent from thought which might be represented by
language in a relation of correspondence or correctness. An idea which was already
present in Nietzsche.

2 I am considering here, in particular, the discussion forum hosted by the site www.snopes.com, which
provided most of the corpus of my doctoral thesis on contemporary legends (unpublished).

The same holds for the notion of truth, which, already with the first pragmatists, appears
as dissociated from the idea of the representation of things in reality. The focus here is
on experience, the way people relate to reality. According to this line of thought, truth
cannot be mere correspondence to reality, but rather the contingent product of relations
that humans establish with each other through usage or, in Wittgensteinian terms,
language games. In other words, being true is not a property which is external to
language, a predicate of things in the world out there, but rather a fundamentally
linguistic device, a predicate of phrases, sentences or propositions, produced by
members of social communities through their interactions and inter-relations.
Richard Rorty, arguably the most outstanding name in current pragmatist philosophy,
formulates the questions in the following terms:
To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that
where there are no sentences, there is no truth, that
sentences are elements of human languages, and that
human languages are human creations. Truth cannot be
out there cannot exist independently of the human mind
because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The
world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.
Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The
world on its own unaided by the describing activities of
human beings cannot. (Rorty 1989: 5)
This reflection leads Rorty to wonder whether truth even deserves philosophical inquiry
as a relevant and unquestionable concept in itself. He questions the utility for human
society of insisting on formulating a theory of truth, a consistent body of thought that
might account for a concept which, after all, pervades all the transcendentalmetaphysical-epistemological problematic, from Plato to Heidegger, and which
continues to confound and obscure philosophers. Instead, Rorty claims, philosophical
thought should set out to describe the conditions in which the true presents itself in
linguistic behaviors, that is, in contingent practices where people do things with
language.
What Rorty values the most in the pragmatist tradition is his precursors vocation
notwithstanding their differences and divergences to shift the focus away from
questions like What in the world is true to questions like How is the word true

used? (Rorty 1991: 132) or, simply, to consider the issue of truth in language in
performative terms, highlighting the necessarily public and hence social nature of language.
In a sort of radical minimalism, what Rorty claims that everything that can be said
about X is what X is, there not being to X an occult or intrinsic side which eludes
the relational apprehension of X through language. For Rorty, truth cannot be
discovered, for that would be admitting that truth depends on what the world is like
in the sense of causal relations rather than descriptive acts.
Broadening this view towards a more specifically political formulation, Rorty argues
that, in an ideally liberal and democratic society, the notion of truth as correspondence
to reality should be replaced by an idea of truth as what one comes to believe over free
and open encounters. For the American philosopher, truth appears as a historical
contingency, and not as a convergence or a rational and universally valid (even if
uncoerced) communicative consensus, such as defended by the likes of Habermas (Hoy
1994). But does that mean one should take Rortys view as reducing truth to a mere
pact, a fragile and capricious agreement between language players?
The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman could be called on into this debate. He aligns
himself with the pragmatist view whereby truth, rather than symbolizing the relation
between what is said and a determined non-verbal reality, stands in our usage for a
certain attitude we take, but above all wish or expect others to take, to what is said or
believed (Bauman 1997: 112). Still, according to Bauman, there is no sense in
speaking of truth if not in a situation of dissent. Truth only comes up as an issue when
different people hold on to different beliefs, making it the object of dispute on who is
right and who is wrong. Truth comes up when one claims the right to speak with
authority, or when it becomes particularly important for an adversary to prove that the
other side of the dispute is wrong. The struggle for truth represents, then, the struggle
for establishing certain beliefs as systematically superior, under the excuse that they
have been reached at through a reliable procedure, or one that is vouched for by the
kind of people who may be trusted to follow it (Bauman op. cit.: 113).
The way I read him, Rorty would put this issue in other, maybe less ideological,
terms. By explaining the relation between truth and justification related to the

cautionary use of truth discussed above the philosopher claims that the need to justify
our beliefs and desires to others and to ourselves subjects us to certain norms, the
obedience to which produces a behavioral pattern which we must detect in others
before we can confidently attribute beliefs to them (Rorty 1998: 26).
In other words, we enter the language game of the communities to which we belong
with certain beliefs, and we know that those we play with possess, on their side, their
own beliefs. But we must attest to the existence of those beliefs performatively, from
within the linguistic exchanges, and not take them as givens. What Rorty does not
believe, perhaps unlike Bauman, is that the rules of the linguistic game necessarily
imply obeying an additional norm the commandment to seek a [final] truth (Rorty
op. cit.: op. cit.).
Reading Legends, Reading Myths: The Lessons Theory Teaches Us
Bringing our contemporary legends back into focus, we could but only begin, in a
tentative exercise of critical reading, to reassess the issue of truth as it manifests itself
in the practice of transmitting and commenting on these narratives. Rather than taking
to the facile opposition between truthfulness versus falsehood, which would imply a
view of truth as correspondence to a self-sustaining order of reality (i.e. the facts, the
truth out there), we would do better by using the lessons our philosophers have
offered and applying them in our language classes in an attempt to reassess our
common sense interpretations and view the discursive practice with different, critical,
eyes.
We could certainly retain Foucaults critique of truth, particularly as it is formulated in
the following passage by Barry Allen, one of his commentators: [f]or truth-value (and
associated values like reference, translation, relevance, implication, identity, and
objectivity) to be determinate in any case depends on the effectiveness of historically
contingent practices of evaluation, and on nothing else (Allen 1995: 110-1). This
amounts to claiming that the difference between true and false cannot be established by
external, context-free parameters. It does not exist apart from a (contingent) local
practice, in which these values are produced and evaluated, and statements circulate as
true, presenting themselves in the form of facts, news, legends (legenda, i.e. what is

to be read). Allen continues: Only here have statements currency, the capacity to
circulate, to penetrate practical reasoning, to be taken seriously, to pass for the truth.
These practical conditions situate truth amid all the major asymmetries of social power,
undermining its status as a common good (Allen op. cit.: 4). Truth then is not common
good. Rather, it is a space for potential dissent, in which power relations will battle their
way towards either debunking or reaffirming the different stakes in the game.
Contemporary legends, more particularly the practical conditions in which they are
produced and perpetuated, function as the stage where a number of partial truths gain
their currency. In other words, they are the space where different regimes, or programs
of truth, are enacted. Believing or not in certain narratives in this or that version of a
specific contemporary legend implies more than a single-minded pursuit of factual
truth. It more likely involves a permanent shift between modes of belief a shift that is
not unlike the one Paul Veyne (1983) identifies in the complex relation the Greeks held
with their myths.
Belonging to a time long gone, in all its wonders, its narratives of gods and men
and fantastic creatures that one does not come across walking on the streets, at least not
in the present , myth offered itself to the Greeks as an integrally truthful reality,
one that transmitted collective memories which could not have been simply invented
lies. As Veyne points out, believing in that body of narrative as a plausible one means
still being within the true, but in analogical terms. Myth is inherited information. It is
an accepted tradition. And it is respected. Once the story is over, we can shift to another
mode of truth that of real life and then back and forth, in an analogical operation.
One may criticize myth from within a historians program of truth rejecting the
chronological incoherence and the improbable cause-and-effect propositions but one
may also be compelled to read allegorical truths into it. To the rationalist
condemnation of the imaginary as false, the apologetic of the imaginary replies that it
conforms to a hidden reason. For it is not possible to lie (Veyne 1983: 62). By
claiming that truth and interest which I equate with (ever-partial) interpretation are
inseparable concepts, Veyne echoes Foucault. Both would agree that in the process of
attempting to fix the meanings of a discourse practice in a regime/program of truth,

contingency (as situatedness) becomes a necessity that keeps justifying itself. And, as
we have seen with Rorty, justifying is one more language game one plays with truth.
In that sense, could contemporary legends be some sort of modern-day myth? I would
argue that just as it is impossible to lie about myth, it may be impossible to lie about
urban legends. The force that a legend may acquire in a certain interpretive community
tends to be greater than the evidence that contests its veracity. Whether or not the
narrative is trustworthy does not affect the impact that the force of its message may
cause. As Whatley and Henken point out:
[T]he evidence countering the veracity of a legend rarely carries the
weight that the legend does. (...) The impact a legend has on those telling
or hearing it may have little to do with whether the story is believed. ()
What may be more important is the truth that folklore conveys about the
attitudes, fears, and beliefs of a group, which in turn shape and maintain
the identity of that group. (Whatley and Henken 2001: 4-5)
Thus, our students may not believe, for example, that someone could have really planted
an HIV-infected needle on their theater seats, but this will not necessarily stop them
from double-checking before sitting. Equally, they may not believe that the long-lasting
use of their cell phones may pose any risk of explosion, but still they will turn off their
devices when pulling into a service station. That is, the most relevant aspect of this kind
of narrative may not be its objectively attested implausibility, but rather the truth it
reveals about the beliefs and values of the communities in which it circulates.
Finally, we could stick with a lesson that Veyne indirectly teaches about the myths of
our present time, and that somehow paves the way toward a more critical
understanding of our object in point. What he says about myth serves just as well for
contemporary legends: in order to engage with those narratives we would do well to
sort through the heterogeneous programs of truth that constitute our imagination
programs that tell us what we, in our communities, are or are not allowed to believe
at different moments in history; programs that intersect or even contradict each other in
our everyday, ever-shifting contingent practices of being in the true. And so, at each
moment, nothing exists or acts outside these [space-defining] palaces of the
imagination... They are the only space available (Veyne 1983: 121).
This Elusive Thing Called Truth

Agents and advocates of Critical Literacy will have identified in all these discussions
one of the tenets of their own belief system, thus summarized by Cervetti et al. (2001:
10): Reality cannot be known definitely, and cannot be captured by language;
decisions about truth, therefore, cannot be based on a theory of correspondence with
reality, but must instead be made locally. Locally in the different interpretive
communities we claim membership to; locally in our classrooms, as we and our
students learn to rethink the often deeply ingrained assumptions we hold on to as truth,
and on what can or cannot be true about the stories we are told.
In view of our theoretical grounding the search for the truth of/in contemporary legends
leads us along the routes of two intersecting tracks. The first one shows that we cannot
possibly learn all the facts and hence all the truth narrated in these stories. That
is, we cannot know with absolute certainty what is a technically, scientifically attested
(or even plausible) fact and what is merely a persistent rumor or piece of
misinformation and I think here particularly of the abundant narratives surrounding
the mysterious powers of not so new technologies, or the risks of yet uncontrollable
diseases. We simply err; we cling to our most essential and mundane truths: that we
are all exposed to too-close-to-home risks, and that someday we will all die. The second
track teaches us that, albeit incomplete, controversial or merely plausible, facts only
make sense insofar as they belong to an itinerary of truth. They are mediated by a
regime of discursive practices that see narrative as a privileged form of manifestation
narratives of a particular type, dispersed and mutable, such as contemporary legends,
but also other narratives of a particular type, those claimed by the legitimized
institutions of power/knowledge that go by the name of science, politics, education, the
media, etc. Ultimately, narratives of this sort are the stuff that makes up the fabric of our
everyday engagements with reality.
So as to make the most out of these reflections in a critical stance towards contemporary
legends, we could perhaps draw the map of those two tracks in the form of a dialectic
sway: one by which the will to truth in legends simultaneously constitutes on the one
hand, a form of social regulation of, and on the other hand, a fictional reinvention of, the
fears and anxieties of daily life, through narrative. Positioning ourselves as teachers and
learners who can perceive and critically engage with this dialectic will have been the

result of a critical practice: a continual, ever-transitory but not a bit elusive exercise
in critical literacy. An exercise which I believe, from my experience, could take place
the moment the agents involved in the language classroom practice venture beyond the
predictable, consensus-aspiring discussion on the falsehood of legends and begin to
think possibly different truths.
REFERENCES:
ALLEN, Barry (1995) Truth in Philosophy. Cambridge and London: Harvard
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