Il continuum copertura prossimale – copertura ancillare. Necessità narrativa e verità nel romanzo di Mark Doten "The Infernal"

The article examines Mark Doten’s debut novel The Infernal (2015) in terms of its distancing from already established renditions of the American “war on terror” by advancing the notion of ancillary coverage. This particular notion derives from the terminological necessity of differentiating between proximal/media coverage and the literary/ancillary coverage of the “war on terror”. Divided into three parts, the article first sets the stage for a methodological reconsideration of the truth–fiction dichotomy by laying out the premises for a proximal–ancillary coverage continuum, then focuses on the notion of proximal coverage as well as its rules and regulations, so as to finally shed light on the notion of ancillary coverage and on how it operates in Doten’s novel.