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In this article, I discuss some influential Chinese theories of fiction and concepts of fiction in ancient times, as well as some contemporary trends in Chinese theories of literature, genre and fiction. This involves discussing several aspects, such as concepts of literature, genre and fiction, the role and status of fiction, recent developments in fiction theory, and the impact of cultural values and political climate etc.. I will also discuss certain features of Chinese theories of fiction and concepts of fiction in the context of influential theories and concepts of fiction in Western culture, such as those in Gregory Currie's The Nature of Fiction and Kendall Walton Mimesis and Make-Believe. Are these theories applicable to Chinese fiction? Are they reconcilable with Chinese theories and concepts of fiction? And finally, is it possible to create credible transcultural theories and concepts of fiction?

In this paper, my aim is to show that in Anglo-American analytic aesthetics, the conception of narrative fiction is in general realistic and that it derives from philosophical theories of fiction-making, the act of producing works of literary narrative fiction. I shall firstly broadly show the origins of the problem and illustrate how the so-called realistic fallacy – the view which maintains that fictions consist of propositions which represent the fictional world “as it is” – is committed through the history of philosophical approaches to literature in the analytic tradition. Secondly, I shall show how the fallacy that derives from the 20th Century philosophy of language manifests itself in contemporary analytic aesthetics, using Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s influential and well-known Gricean make-believe theory of fiction as an example. Finally, I shall sketch how the prevailing Gricean make-believe theories should be modified in order to reach the literary-fictive use of language and to cover fictions broader than Doyle’s stories and works alike.

The role of the narrator in fiction has recently received renewed interest from scholars in philosophical aesthetics and narratology. Many of the contributions criticise how the term is used – both outside of narrative literature as well as within the field of fictional narrative literature. The central part of the attacks has been the ubiquity of fictional narrators, see e. g. Kania (2005), and pan-narrator theories have been dismissed, e. g. by Köppe and Stühring (2011). Yet, the fictional narrator has been a decisive tool within literary narratology for many years, in particular during the heyday of classical literary narratology. For scholars like Genette (1988) and Cohn (1999), the category of the fictional narrator was at the centre of theoretical debates about the demarcation of fiction and non-fiction. Arguably, theorising about the fictional narrator necessitates theorising about fiction in general. From this, it follows that any account on which the fictional narrator is built ideally would be a theory of fiction compatible with all types of fictional narrative media – not just narrative fiction like novels and short stories.In this vein, this paper applies a transmedial approach to the question of fictional narrators in different media based on the transmedial theory of fiction in terms of make-believe by Kendall Walton (1990). Although the article shares roughly the same theoretical point of departure as Köppe and Stühring, that is, an analytical-philosophical theory of fiction as make-believe, it offers a diametrically different solution. Building on the distinction between direct and indirect fictional truths as developed by Kendall Walton in his seminal theory of fiction as make-believe (1990), this paper proposes the fictional presence of a narrator in all fictional narratives. Importantly, ›presence‹ in terms of being part of a work of fiction needs to be understood as exactly that:fictionalpresence, meaning that the question of what counts as a fictional truth is of great importance. Here, the distinction between direct and indirect fictional truths is crucial since not every fictional narrative – not even every literary fictional narrative – makes it directly fictionally true that it is narrated. To exemplify: not every novel begins with words like »Call me Ishmael«, i. e., stating direct fictional truths about its narrator. Indirect, implied fictional truths can also be part of the generation of the fictional truth of a fictional narrator. Therefore, the paper argues that every fictional narrative makes it (at least indirectly) fictionally true that it is narrated.More specifically, the argument is made that any theory of fictional narrative that accepts fictional narrators in some cases (as e. g. suggested by proponents of the so-called optional narrator theory, such as Currie [2010]), has to accept fictional narrators in all cases of fictional narratives. The only other option is to remove the category of fictional narrators altogether. Since the category of the fictional narrator has proved to be extremely useful in the history of narratology, such removal would be unfortunate, however. Instead, a solution is suggested that emphasizes the active role of recipients in the generation of fictional truths, and in particular in the generation of implied fictional truths.Once the narratological category of the fictional narrator is understood in terms of fictional truth, the methodological consequences can be fully grasped: without the generation of fictional truths in a game of make-believe, there are no fictional narratives – and no fictional narrators. The fictionality of narratives depends entirely on the fact that they are used as props in a game of make-believe. If they are not used in this manner, they are nothing but black dots on paper, the oxidation of silver through light, or any other technical description of artefacts containing representations. Fictional narrators are always based on fictional truths, they are the result of a game of make-believe, and hence the only evidence for a fictional narrator is always merely fictional. If it is impossible to imagine that the fictional work is narrated, then the work is not a narrative.In the first part of the paper, common arguments for and against the fictional narrator are discussed, such as the analytical, realist, transmedial, and the so-called evidence argument; in addition, unreliable narration in fictional film will be an important part in the defence of the ubiquitous fictional narrator in fictional narrative. If the category of unreliable narration relies on the interplay of both author, narration, and reader, the question of unreliable narration within narrative fiction that is not traditionally verbal, such as fiction films, becomes highly problematic. Based on Walton’s theory of make-believe, part two of the paper presents a number of reasons why at least implied fictional narrators are necessary for the definition of fictional narrative in different media and discusses the methodological consequences of this theoretical choice.

Although George Washington Cable is now widely known as a perceptive writer on transracial subjects, it was not until his third short story, (1874), that Cable introduced black-white racial issues in his published fiction. Indeed, a number of central concerns which Cable developed in writings throughout his career, including social construction of racial categories, possibilities of changing natural feelings about racial difference, interrelated race and gender issues, as well as legal ramifications of interracial relationships, are compellingly presented in this first of Cable's published fictions ofrace. With Poulette, too, Cable for the first introduces engaging, if still largely stereotyped, women characters, as well as a more developed and integrated central male figure, the young Dutch immigrant Kristian Koppig, one of a series of portrayals of an alternate masculinity, a Southern masculinity vulnerable to change, that reflects a key interest of Cable throughout his writing life. and in his related narrative of Madame Delphine (1881) (1) Cable explores possibilities for change in the South of his own young manhood, a volatile Period after emancipation and before segregation was sanctioned by the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling of 1896. that window of when it seemed to many that the future was open, Cable wrote against any idea of looking back to an idealized, monolithically-conceived past of male supremacy as a basis for constructing a New South. With a conception of fiction as parable and believing that progress in the South required change of individual Southern men and Southern women, Cable modeled with individual characters possibilities of transformation of familiar Southern values and cultural practices regarding men's and women's roles, race, and, especially in Madame Delphine, religion. I As in many of his early short stories, at the opening of Poulette, the plane of Cable's third person narration is set near the of the story's composition, New Orleans in the early 1870s, toward the end of Reconstruction. Interweaving recollections of the old New Orleans of the of Kristian Koppig with touristic impressions of the Vieux Carre of his own postbellum era, the narrator suggests an interpenetrating past and present in which the past continues to impinge on and shape contemporary time. a pivotal phrase toward the end of the opening frame narrative, Cable's narrator introduces the story of Kristian and `Tite Poulette with a mellow, once upon a time intonation: In the good old times of duels, and bagatelle-clubs, and theatre-balls, and Cayetano's circus (214). The bland, ingenuous tone here teases the reader with a hint of a picturesque New Orleans of honor and grace. Such a conventional, sanitized vision of an idyllic prewar Louisiana was promulgated in Cable's day by the prominent Creole writer and spokesman Charles Gayarre and others and served to buttress supremacist ideology in the postbellum era. (See Tregle 169-70, 173-74, 178-83 and Tunnel 1-7.) Central to the mythic, ideal Southern vision were men who would physically fight for honor and women of grace and virtue, virtue respected and actively protected by men of honor. (See Wyatt-Brown 34-55; 227.) Early on we learn that is socially, not just physically, determined, and that for white-appearing 'Tite Poulette and her mother, Madame John, not being real white (221) is the most important thing to know about the two central women characters. an indirect fashion, easy to miss on first reading, Cable's narrator suggests how Madame John's socially imposed race and gender status as quadroon lad[y] (217) is fundamental to her identity in her immediate Vieux Carre Creole community as well as her possibilities in life: [W]ho was this Madame John? …

THE FUSION OF FICTION AND NON-FICTION | Dorrit Cohn’s influential theory of fiction draws a clear distinction between the fictive and non-fictive narrative domains. Though to some extent useful in the examination of fictive and non-fictive features in literary narratives, Cohn’s theory exhibits certain limitations and contradictions when submitted to careful investigation. These weaknesses in Cohn’s theory become conspicuous when viewed in the light of one of the most progressive tendencies in contemporary European literature, which is exactly a merging of the traditionally divided domains: fiction and nonfiction. Requiem by Danish Peer Hultberg, Min kamp by Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård and Atemschaukel by German Herta Müller constitute interesting examples of this tendency. The application of Cohn’s theory to these specific works entails a strong challenge of anumber of pivotal ideas in her conception of fiction since none of the works can be placed in either of Cohn’s domains without a considerable reduction of their expression. The works thus represent a fusion. The combination of fiction’s privilege of use of distinctive fictional discourses, most notably free indirect discourse, with nonfiction’s privilege of referentiality results in the production of an extra dimension. Through fusion the works illustrate the potentiality of narrative in creating an expression thatexceeds what fiction and nonfiction are capable of individually, and, consequently, they point toward the necessity of analytical operation beyond a clear division between fictional and non-fictional narrative.

Narrative, Imagination and Concepts of Fiction in Late Antique Hagiography

Qu’est-ce qu’une fiction ? Anatomie des fictions de Freud à Lacan

This study interrogates the concept of fictionality in the premodern Arabic tradition through probing into different readings of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Book of Kalīla and Dimna. Instead of presupposing the applicability of the modern concept of fictionality, I suggest to use the concept as a hermeneutic category that can encompass different perspectives on what exactly is fictional in a text. After identifying the challenges of defining fictionality in the pre-modern Arabic textual tradition, I shall look into some of the readers of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s translation between the third/ninth and sixth/twelfth centuries to unpack different modalities. Some readers such as Ibn Qutayba in his ʿUyūn al-akhbār (Essential Accounts) and Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih in his al-ʿIqd al-farīd (The Unique Necklace) foreground the ethical function of parables and gnomic sayings and ignore the fact that most of Kalīla wa-Dimna’s stories contain animal characters. Others such as al-Yamanī in his Muḍāhāt amthāl kitāb Kalīla wa-Dimna (The Analogues of Kalīla wa-Dimna’s Parables) and al-Bīrūnī in his Geography of India tackle the ontology of fictionality from the perspective of reliability versus unreliability associated to Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s claim over the authenticity of his transmission of “the Indian book.” Finally, focusing on Ibn Sīnā’s and Ibn Rushd’s Commentaries to Aristotle’s Poetics, I show how Kalīla wa-Dimna as a prime example of parables (amthāl) and invented stories belongs to rhetorical discourse and has to be distinguished from poetic discourse which generates images (takhyīl). By opposing the two types of discourse — poetry and stories from Kalīla wa-Dimna — in terms of both their ontological status and their functionality, they portray, I argue, a different taxonomy of fictionality. Although all these various readers might agree that Kalīla wa-Dimna contains fictive content, the different interpretations defy a classification of Kalīla wa-Dimna within the modern dichotomy of fictional versus factual narrative but allow us to uncover different ontological and pragmatic modalities of fictionality in the premodern past.

Good Family: Agreeing and Disagreeing with Richard Walsh James Phelan (bio) As a collaborator with Richard Walsh and Henrik Skov Nielsen on “Ten Theses about Fictionality,” I was not surprised to find myself nodding frequently as I read through Richard’s target essay. “Yes, Richard, just so!,” I thought to myself as I read such claims as the following: “The premise most fundamentally at odds with a rhetorical approach is that fictionality does not attach to the fiction-producing communicative act, but to its product, a fictional referent or object” (Walsh, “Fictionality as Rhetoric” 399). And As a rhetorical move [fictionality] is not intrinsic to any particular features of the utterance, but is circumstantial; it consists in the re-orientation of communicative attention achieved by the contextual assumption of fictionality itself. This assumption . . . is just a pragmatic, contextual inference about communicative purposes manifest in the shared cognitive environment between communicator and audience. (412) My overall responses to the target essay, then, are endorsement and admiration: how great to have Richard making such a forceful case for a rhetorical approach to fictionality. Nevertheless, as Richard notes, in order to focus on the “Ten Theses” that he, Henrik, and I put forward in 2015, we had to set aside some “significant points of difference” (“Fictionality as Rhetoric” 422n2) in our individual views. Since Richard appropriately uses the target essay to articulate his views, I respond with my take on some of the contested issues. Given the limits of space, I address only two points: (1) the relation of my proposal about narrative communication to an understanding of fictionality as rhetoric; (2) the relative explanatory power of our respective conceptions of fictionality.1 For [End Page 502] Richard, fictionality is “a contextual assumption prompting us to understand an utterance’s communicative relevance as indirectly, rather than directly, informative” (414), an assumption entailing the idea that the truth status of the utterance is beside the point. For me, fictionality is intentionally communicated invention, projection, or other means of directing an audience to consider nonactual states or events. This conception entails the idea that truth status is part and parcel of tellers’ and audiences’ judgments about an utterance’s fictionality—and about its effects.2 Here’s Richard’s characterization of my work on narrative communication3: [W]hen James Phelan, whose rhetorical approach to fiction has deep roots in the history of narrative theory, proposes to adapt and extend Seymour Chatman’s version of the narrative communication model (Phelan, “Authors, Resources, Audiences”) . . . it seems as if the weight of that heritage has pulled his concept of fictionality out of orbit, in another kind of lapse back into a representational model of fiction. (415) I see I need to clarify my argument. My discussion of Chatman is not an effort to “adapt and extend” his communication model (which famously posits a one-way transmission from real author to real reader through implied author, narrator, narratee, and implied reader). Instead, I reject the model and propose to replace it with one that I find more responsive to the practices of narrative artists. The fundamental difference between the two models follows from the difference between a structuralist and a rhetorical view of narrative. For Chatman narrative is a structure that synthesizes a what (story) and a how (discourse), and, thus, for him, communication is subordinate to structure. That’s why characters (elements of story) are not in his line of transmission. For me narrative is an action in which authors use (or opt not to use) a wide assortment of resources (narrators, characters, temporality, space, etc.) in diverse combinations in order to accomplish particular communicative purposes in relation to particular audiences—whose presence influences the teller’s narrative act. Furthermore, this account applies to both fictional and nonfictional narratives, and it locates the differences between them in the “context of communicative intent” (402) governing their production. Thus, in my view both structure and representation are subordinate to communication. I infer from the target essay that Richard would agree. If so, then he and I will continue to have some disagreements about details [End Page 503] of my model (e.g., the role of a narrative audience), but...

Refiguring Narrative ReceptionThe Challenge to Ricoeur’s Theory of Narrative Closure by the Open Text John Arthos (bio) If Paul Ricoeur had not developed a narrative theory for hermeneutics it would have to have been written at some point, so necessary is narrative to rendering the discursive character of hermeneutic being (see Arthos 2011). Yet although welcomed from many corners, it was also immediately controversial (Carr 1986). Since metanarratives were the target of postmodern theory as a strong signifier of the ideological face of hegemony, Ricoeur’s construction of narrative as a discursive medium of coherence and identity in the tradition of the hermeneutics of faith sat itself up like a bull’s-eye.1 But as Haydn White’s serial reviews of Time and Narrative show, the work was too good to dismiss out of hand (1987 (2007). In fact, it is possible to affirm much of what Lyotard, Foucault, and others laid at the feet of narrative and still welcome Ricoeur’s constructive theoretical contributions. To be sure, even friendly critics have noted that Ricoeur’s exposition is circumscribed [End Page 1] too narrowly within an Aristotelian framework and tailored too closely to canonic texts. At the same time, feminist and other critical perspectives suggest the theory itself may be able to transcend these limitations.2 My goal in this essay is simply to ask whether new and less homogeneous narrative forms than those Ricoeur worked with can be comprehended through the lens of his concept of narrative. Ricoeur’s narrative theory describes the porosity of the boundary between the artifice of the story and the contingent materiality of life, and their complex movement back and forth. The particular aspect of this movement I want to focus on is Ricoeur’s shift in the theory of reception over the course of the three volumes of Time and Narrative from what he calls “transcendence within immanence” to something called “transcending immanence.” This happens as Ricoeur passes from the reception of literature to a full-on ontology. By the end of his analysis, his tripartite model of mimetic prefiguration, configuration, and refiguration is conceived as a process that expands outward in a growing circle beyond the literary text to the construction of the phenomenological life-world. In the conclusion to volume 2 he affirms categorically that “the boundary between configuration and refiguration has not yet been crossed, as long as the world of the work remains a transcendence immanent in the text,” and only “after a theory of reading has been proposed in one of the concluding chapters of volume three will fictional narrative be able to assert its claims to truth, at the cost of a radical reformulation of the problem of truth” (1985: 160). This final version of reconfiguration ties its anchor posts over the course of volume 2, part 3, and then acts as the resolution of the major problem in volume 3 (part 4, section 2), which is to know how to draw narrative history and fiction into the same circle. Ricoeur’s final vision is that, to the extent that we can, we construct a life through the narrative capacity to fashion the materials of the interpreted past and the possible future. Mimesis has even more agency than I think Ricoeur accounted for, and I want to see if I can expand its range a bit further. I am going to explore one dimension of narrative pleasure that is not developed in Ricoeur’s narrative theory per se but which is not a correction to the theory either. This example will illustrate how Ricoeur’s theoretical model is robust enough to stretch well beyond its somewhat narrow grounding in conventional [End Page 2] Western literature. It is because of new forms of storytelling, such as interactive fiction, fanzines, and cyberperformance, that we can see new possibilities for the work of refiguration. The Two Fields of Refiguration Ricoeur’s theory of fiction conjoins three traditions: the phenomenological concept of life-world, the Kantian concept of productive imagination, and the hermeneutic idea of interpretation as projection. This combination yields a concept of narrative fiction that he describes as “a world capable of being inhabited,” a habitable...

This chapter outlines three themes that it takes to be central to the conception of narrative fiction as an autopoietic system: closure, observation and coupling. Closure refers to the processes by which a system such as a narrative distinguishes itself, through its own internal operations, from its environment. Observation refers to the emergence and vicissitudes of linguistic function in the artistic text, function being dependent on the proliferating, recursively embedded perspectives at stake in narrative fiction (perspectives of readers, narrators, characters). Coupling refers to the constraints that interacting autopoietic systems impose on one another, and how this process should be understood in relation to narrative—either in terms of interactions between reader and text, or between broader autopoietic systems of perception and communication. These themes are explored with reference to Aristotelian narrative theory, the functionalist semiotics of Jan Mukařovský and the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann.

In his discussions of life as narrative, and identity as narrative identity, Paul Ricoeur has claimed that we learn to become narrators and heroes of our own stories, without actually becoming the authors of our own lives. This idea, that we cannot be the author of our own life-story in the same way that the author of fictional narrative is the author of that story, seems at first incontestable, given that we are caught up within the enactment of the narrative that is our life, unlike the author of a fictional story who also has an independent existence outside that story. This asymmetry leads Ricoeur to pronounce that an ineradicable difference exists between fictional and life narratives. But is this difference in fact ineffaceable, or is there a sense in which we can be said to be the authors of our own lives? In this article I suggest that there are more points of similarity than Ricoeur explicitly recognizes between what authors do in writing fictional narratives and what we do in figuring, prospectively, our lives. These similarities are brought to light by a revision of the naïve, received concept of author and, once acknowledged, serve to bridge the purportedly ‘unbridgeable gap’ between fictional narratives and life narratives. I then consider how bridging this gap — establishing ourselves as authors as well as narrators — has ethical implications with regard to creating our own lives: a creation which authoring implies, but which is — given the revised notion of author — limited, both by the reciprocity of the other as co-author and by those events in life which the life-author is not fully able to plot.

The article outlines an explication of the concept of ›mimetically unreliable narration‹ i. e. the idea that a fictional narrative is reliable if it gives an unobjectionable account of the fictional facts, and unreliable, if it does not. While we agree with the majority of contemporary narratology that a narrator can be distrusted in a number of different ways, we argue that the diversity of mimetical unreliability runs deeper than is generally acknowledged. There is a distinction to be made that is based on the question whether the unreliable narration has, or has not, a narrator in the first place. Thus we claim that there are two kinds of mimetically unreliable narrations: ones with a narrator and ones without a narrator. The paper explains this distinction and defends it against a number of objections. In the introduction of our paper, we argue for the assumption that not every fictional narrative has a fictional narrator by drawing on a certain understanding of fictionality According to the so-called ›institutional Theory of Fiction‹, fictional texts ask their readers to adopt a particular, rule-governed attitude of reception towards the text. Adopting this attitude means, centrally, to treat the sentences of the text as an invitation to imagine certain things. Some fictional texts invite their readers to imagine that there is a fictional narrator. This means that the text prompts us to imagine that we are reading or listening to someone's narrative. Some fictional narratives do not prompt us to imagine anything of the text of the work or about a teller. Instead, these narratives require us to merely use the sentences of the work as a prop to imagine certain things based on their content. Based on this observation, we argue that both kinds of fictional narratives can be mimetically unreliable and propose to clarify the concept of mimetical unreliability as follows: The narration expressed by a literary work is mimetically unreliable if, and only if, the work authorizes imagining that the narrator does not provide completely accurate information, or the work does not authorize imagining that there is a narrator; instead it seemingly, or prima facie , authorizes imagining states of affairs that are not completely accurate. We elaborate on the components of this proposal, dwell on some of its apparent problems, comment on several competing understandings of unreliability in fictional narratives, discuss the question whether it should be seen as a comparative or as a classificatory term, and briefly address the concept's ascription in the context of textual interpretation. The distinction between unreliable narrations with a narrator and without is not meant to replace other current distinctions between varieties of unreliability in fictional narratives. The main interest of our proposal lies in the way it uses the theory of fiction in order to shed light on narrative unreliability. Narrative unreliability, in our view, is a complex phenomenon in that its explanation presupposes some such theoretical underpinning.

This essay, as part of a project exploring the concept of fictionality from a rhetorical perspective, considers novelistic communication in terms of the metaphor of the novelist as medium. I suggest that this metaphor avoids treating narrative creativity as the symbolic articulation of authorial intentions, without reducing novelistic discourse to the communication of fictional narrative as literal information. The essay examines certain kinds of experience, common among novelists, in which creativity is equated with a loss of narrative control: I elaborate upon the senses in which such narrative obligations situate the novelist as a 'medium' negotiating between the narrative and its readers. The argument centres upon novelists' own accounts of their experiences of creativity, with particular reference to Walker, Bronte, Scott, Trollope, Bowen, James and Barthelme. I establish the common features of novelistic mediation, and distinguish between accounts which invoke obligations to higher discursive authorities and those which appeal to representational imperatives. The latter are pursued in more detail, first in relation to the ubiquitous notion of novelists' deference to the demands of their characters, and then in relation to the autonomy of story itself. Throughout I trace the recurrence, in these novelists' reflections, of an association between the nebulous issue of narrative creativity and practical considerations about their professional authority and accountability to a readership.

Getting People Right. Getting Fiction Right:Self-Fashioning, Fictionality, and Ethics in the Roth Books Stefan Kjerkegaard (bio) On the basis of readings in several self-fashioning and thought-provoking novels by Philip Roth this article seeks to rethink a limited set of narratological core concepts such as fiction and fictionality in light of their treatment within recent theories on narrative communication by James Phelan (2011) and Richard Walsh (2007). I will argue in favor of a simpler and more rhetorical model than used by these two leading scholars within narratological studies. According to the definition employed in this essay, the self-fashioning novel uses autobiographical material and means with the intention of reaching specific aesthetic ends. These means might include the author’s name, as in autofiction, or other material such as gender and correspondence in history and identity. Autofictional novels use and abuse the autobiographical contract where author, narrator, and protagonist share the same name. Hence, some autofictions try to hide the fact that they are novels by assimilating autobiographical genres such as autobiography, confession, or memoir, while other autofictions are in fact more or less autobiographies, but use rhetoric related to and imported from fiction. I shall read Roth’s novels consecutively, as gradually developing new understandings of reality and identity, and trace the intersections of aesthetics and ethics in Roth’s body of works. For the most part, my focus will [End Page 121] be on The Facts. A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988) and Operation Shylock. A Confession (1993), two of the most ambiguous of the Roth Books with regard to their limits as works of art, their genre, and their use of autobiographical material. Employing James Phelan’s distinction between ethics of telling and ethics of the told (Phelan 2007), I will argue that the uncompromising aesthetic of these two works, as well as those published immediately before and after them (The Counterlife [1986] and American Pastoral [1997]) is designed to transcend readers’ initially negative moral judgment and lead them to a deeper kind of ethics, grounded in dialogue, discourse, and sociality as such. I will contrast Phelan’s understanding of narrative ethics, as seen from the viewpoint of the literary work as an artifact, with Judith Butler’s thoughts on ethics and self-narration in Giving an Account of Oneself. Richard Walsh’s understanding of fictionality as a rhetorical rather than ontological quality plays an important part in the above-mentioned enterprise. Walsh argues that whether you read a text as fictive or assume that a statement is fictional depends on relevance (The Rhetoric of Fictionality 7). What he wants to develop is not a theoretical discourse that removes the artistic enunciation from the world or from referentiality altogether. On the contrary, to adopt a fictionality approach in relation to any kind of work or discourse is, in Walsh’s view, to maximize relevance. The novelty of his theory is that it leads literature back to a simpler rhetorical model—simpler than the models developed in classic rhetorical narratology as, for instance, Seymour Chatman’s idea of an implied author and reader—and that it takes into account an always already communicative relationship between a sender and a receiver (empirical author and reader), and disengages the concept of fictionality from specific media and genre questions. The concept of fictionality can therefore be applied to literature as well as to everyday conversations or full-blown fictional narratives. In Walsh’s words: Fictionality is neither a boundary between worlds, nor a frame dissociating the author from the discourse, but a contextual assumption by the reader, prompted by the manifest information that the authorial discourse is offered as fiction. (36) [End Page 122] Walsh’s understanding of fictionality is compatible with a more discursive approach like Butler’s. I will use both to argue that Roth’s innovative late novels are not merely quixotic and playful metafiction, but serious attempts to tell us something about who we are and how reality works. Their innovation, to use Walsh’s words from Novel Arguments, “far from being a refusal of engagement, is an attempt to extend fiction’s capacity for thinking about the world” (18). The second part of...