Bentham, Iser, and the Necessity of Fiction

This is a story about Bentham's theory of fictions. But it is also a story about Bentham's theory of facts because, as Bentham painstakingly demonstrates, fiction and fact are inseparable aspects of the same cognitive process. This part of Bentham's work has been obscured by the common misapprehension that positivism, which Bentham endorsed and indeed in some sense fathered, commits us to making a sharp distinction between fact and fiction, much like the one he argued for between value and fact. In practice, fiction is indeed defined in contradistinction to fact, but Bentham's conception of the link between the two went much further. In his view fictions create facts, which are fictions, as these terms are properly understood. This view of Bentham is wholly at odds with the standard view of him as the arch-critic of, specifically, legal fictions. Bentham was indeed a scathing critic of the use of fiction in the discourse of law. But when one understands the broader sense in which Bentham classified legal facts as species of fiction, it is clear that his criticisms of legal fictions are more qualified than is commonly thought. From this point of view, legal fictions can be seen as the soft underbelly of the law of evidence to which Bentham devoted himself to systematizing, and therefore cannot be adequately comprehended apart from his views about the nature of evidence, and his general theory of fiction and fact. Bentham's theory of the fictional nature of facts, which I will refer to here as fictionalism, or alternatively, fictionalist realism, exemplifies a broader intellectual tradition that is characterized by several interlocking themes, only one of which is the focus of attention here namely, a duality of perspectives regarding fiction and fact. According to Robert Newsom, the key to the nature of fiction is the nature of belief engendered by fiction neither simple credulity, nor the complete absence of

This essay aims to rethink a rhetorical microgenre: the “sentence” or sententia, a brief maxim usually stating a moral principle. My aim is to show that rhetorical sentences entail more flexible cognitive and interpretive acts than has usually been recognized. I read the theory and practice of the sentence alongside that of legal maxims, arguing that these small forms can cast a useful light on each other. I focus in particular on literary characters who misuse sentences in ways that prompt inferences about them that go beyond anything they either could or would say themselves. The act of sentence-making entails a judgment that balances the content of the statement against the context in which it is made; that judgment has analogues in law, in both equitable interpretation and the theory of fictions; in literature, that legal hermeneutics is put to work for the construction of character, conscripting what cognitive science calls “mentalizing” for the projection of a kind of inwardness fashioned out of the materials of common opinion. The essay ends by arguing that connecting rhetorical sentences to legal maxims allows us to think seriously about the relationship between legal and literary fiction as it shapes Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Since the comprehensive theorization of liminality and its attributes by the Scottish anthropologist Victor Turner in the late 1960s and 1970s, the concept of liminality has been applied to more than the threshold experience of individuals. As liminality in general describes a state of transition, the concept has been expanded to include rather different spaces, genres, and conditions. In this article, I propose liminality as a threshold concept that might offer a new and different angle for looking at legal and literary fiction(s). Liminality might allow us to bridge the conceptual gaps between the disciplines with regard to the general use and function of fiction(s) and fictionality in law and in literature; it may thus prove to be valuable for interdisciplinary approaches in both fields. I will, however, not attempt to formulate a new theory of fiction, since in contrast to the numerous and not always successful attempts at defining fiction(s) and fictionality, I am not interested in locking down either phenomena in law and in literature, but rather in identifying and highlighting some common aspects. Liminality, I argue, lends itself profitably to the cross-disciplinary orientation of an approach which addresses both legal and literary perspectives. It appears to be particularly suited to bring out the functions of fictions and fictionality in both law and literature, which is ultimately to translate the merely imaginable into something conceivable.

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.

British Formalist Aesthetics and Its Literary Writing Practice

In this paper, I approach Gottlob Frege’s fictional antirealism from the background of the discussion on cognitive value of literature in philosophy of literature, with particular emphasis on Frege’ s influence on Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen’s (1994) theory of fiction. I claim that Frege’s writings on fiction do not support the conclusion that we should reject literary cognitivism (the view that literature can provide cognitive benefits). I support this view by providing two lines of argument: 1) a disagreement with respect to the precise nature of Frege’s fictional antirealism results in multiple interpretations of his thought, which is why the application of Frege’s fictional antirealism in Lamarque and Olsen’s theory is dependent on various incongruent assumptions (which I call ‘multiple readings’ of Frege) and 2) satisfaction of the conditions of a strict notion of truth is not crucially important for showing that literary fiction can have cognitive value. This is evident from the fact that the contemporary debates on aesthetic and literary cognitivism often depart from exclusive interest in (and dependence on) truth by appealing to the plurality of cognitive values, not all of which are dependent on truth.

Most scientific models are not physical objects, and this raises important questions. What sort of entity are models, what is truth in a model, and how do we learn about models? In this paper I argue that models share important aspects in common with literary fiction, and that therefore theories of fiction can be brought to bear on these questions. In particular, I argue that the pretence theory as developed by Walton (1990) has the resources to answer these questions. I introduce this account, outline the answers that it offers, and develop a general picture of scientific modelling based on it.

ESC 25, 1999 Calin-Andrei Mihalescu and Walid Harmeneh, eds., Fiction Up­ dated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics (Toron­ to: University of Toronto Press, 1996.) xiii, 327. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. As its title suggests, this collection endeavours to make more current our understanding of relations between truth and fiction in contexts predominantly but not exclusively imaginative. The authors of the twenty-four essays featured here take their cue from the multi-faceted Prague-School work of Lubomir Dolezel, who taught for many years at the University of Toronto. Priv­ ileging neither mimetic theory nor deconstruction but building rather on “possible-worlds semantics,” this collection seeks to find a different and more spacious ground or more penetrating avenue by means of which to rework our understanding of those analogies and hypotheses, the as ifs and what ifs, on which so much fiction productively turns. The volume, after a substan­ tial introduction by the editors, unfolds in six parts dealing successively with Fictions and Philosophies; Models; Names, Genre, Gender; Fictions and Histories; Poetics; and Dolezel and His Worlds. The four essays in the first section engage in unevenly com­ plementary ways with the ontological status of “fictional worlds.” Ruth Ronan relies on terms like “original,” “accurate,” and “lit­ eral” to expose the “conceptual affinity between literary theory and possible-worlds frameworks” that derive from a more gen­ eral relativizing of truth (29). Nicholas Rescher poses a number o f troubling questions that reveal our reliance on and limited understanding of anything other than the “natural history” of fictions (38). John W oods turns the logical screws to little literary purpose, while Peter McCormick returns to the need for a metaphysical component in any theory of fiction while at the same time modestly reminding fellow philosophers that the best art and criticism need not look to philosophy for the ef­ fective rendering (and unravelling) of complexity. The section on Models begins forbiddingly for the average literary reader, but Pierre Ouellet’s appeal to the reader’s “experience” of a text is a relief (78), as is his accessible valuing of the “close but tenuous” link between the experienced world and fictionality 108 R E V IE W S (89-90). Siegfried Schmidt establishes some interesting paral­ lels between fiction and mass media while locating young people in something of a post-dichotomous ‘nineties zone’. The high­ light of the section on Names, Genre, Gender is Eva Kushner’s essay on the renaissance dialogue — Platonic, Ciceronian, and Lucianic versions — where she makes good use of Dolezel’s nar­ rative typology to present imagined conversations as a shrewdly wordly version of possible worlds. The most impressive essays in the volume are in the fourth and fifth sections. Linda Hutcheon’s meditation on Coetzee’s Foe offers a challenge to possible-worlds semantics that she her­ self terms “friendly” (214) but that seems to me irrefutable. W ith her usual patience and generosity, Hutcheon discloses the homogenizing cultural imperatives behind Dolezel’s taxonomy of narrative modes; at the same time,with her eye for the sub­ tleties of reflexive resistance and dissent, she ably defends Coetzee against most implications of Nadine Gordimer’s accusation of “stately fastidiousness” (225). The essays by Umberto Eco (on Aristotle’s Poetics) and Michael Riffaterre (on Bakhtin’s treatment of the chronotope) are lesser things, and of interest primarily because of the reputation of their authors. Nancy Felson-Rubin reminds us that fictions are purveyed orally as well as textually, but she restricts herself to the example of Homer. No hint here o f the rich Indigenous oral traditions to which Canadian comparativists and narratologists need to pay more, and more respectful, attention. The essays on Chinese narrative by Douwe Fokkema and Polish formalism and struc­ turalism by Edward Mozejko offer welcome reminders of the diversity of the one world whose existence we are bound to ad­ mit, before we turn in conclusion to the preoccupations and achievement of Lubomir Dolezel. In this connection, HansGeorge Ruprecht gives an imaginary account of Borges and Dolezel in Prague in 1968, just before the Russian tanks rolled in to crush the reform movement headed by Alexander Dubcek. The final chapter...

The first full-fledged application of the sacrificial model to fiction from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Cesareo Bandera contends that we badly misjudge our own historical situation if we believe that the sacred is something that can be left behind or ignored as utterly irrelevant. The Sacred Game argues that the sacred is all around us and its most characteristic manifestation is precisely the allergic reaction and subsequent barrier it produces in our secular sensitivity as soon as we come in contact with it. The Sacred Game examines the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era from a Girardian perspective. It brings light to the weakening of the traditional association of literature with the sacred and its far-reaching consequences, and it studies the logic that governs the emergence of the most characteristic forms of modern fiction, the modern novel and the modern theater. Bandera emphasizes the unprecedented character of what happened to literary fiction during this transition. While the historical facts of the period are well known, Bandera presents them in a new light. The result is a new theory of literary fiction that challenges certain well-established approaches, in particular the nineteenth-century liberal romantic and Marxist approaches.

Legal fictions are falsehoods that the law knowingly relies on. It is the most bizarre feature of our legal system; we know something is false, and we still assume it. But why do we rely on blatant falsehood? What are the implications of doing so? Should we continue to use fictions, and, if not, what is the alternative? Legal Fictions in Private Law answers these questions in an accessible and engaging manner, looking at the history of fictions, the theory of fictions, and current fictions from a practical perspective. It proposes a solution to what to do about fictions going forward, and how to decide whether they should be accepted or rejected. It addresses the latest literature and deals with the law in detail. This book is a comprehensive analysis of legal fictions in private law and a blueprint for reform.

The emergent culture of crime writings in late 19th century colonial Bengal (India) is an interesting testimony to how literature is shaped by various material forces including the market. This book deals with true crime writings of the late 1800s published by ‘lowbrow publishing houses’ — infamous for publishing ‘sensational’ and the ‘vulgar’ literature — which had an avid bhadralok (genteel) readership. The volume focuses on select translations of true crime writings by Bakaullah and Priyanath Mukhopadhyay who worked as darogas (Detective Inspectors) in the police department in mid-late nineteenth century colonised Bengal. These published accounts of cases investigated by them are among the very first manifestations of the crime genre in India. The writings reflect their understandings of criminality and guilt, as well as negotiations with colonial law and policing. Further, through a selection of cases in which women make an appearance either as victims or offenders, (or sometimes as both,) this book sheds light on the hidden gendered experiences of the time, often missing in mainstream Bangla literature. Combining a love for suspense with critical readings of a cultural phenomenon, this book will be of much interest to scholars and researchers of comparative literature, translation studies, gender studies, literary theory, cultural studies, modern history, and lovers of crime fiction from all disciplines.

Review

Fictionality is a term used in various fields within and beyond literary theory, from speech act theory through the theory of fictional worlds, to theories of “as if.” It is often equated with the genre of the novel. However, as a consequence of the rhetorical theory of fictionality developed from the early 21st century, the concept has gained ground as an autonomous communicative device, independent of its relation to any genre. Theories of fictionality have been developed (1) prior to the establishment of fiction as a genre, with Plato, Aristotle, Philip Sidney, and Pierre Daniel Huet; (2) with the establishment of fiction by Blankenburg and some of the first novelists, such as Daniel Defoe and Horace Walpole; (3) after the establishment of the novel, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hans Vaihinger, John Searle, Kendall Walton, Dorrit Cohn, Richard Walsh, and others. From the 1990s, the debates on fictionality have centered on questions of whether fictionality is best described in terms of semantic, syntactic, or pragmatic approaches. This includes discussions about possible signposts of fictionality, encouraged by the semantic and syntactic approaches, and about how to define the concept of fictionality, as either a question of text internal features as argued by the semantic and syntactic theorists, or as a question of contextual assumptions, as held by the pragmatists. Regarding fictionality as a rhetorical resource, among many other resources in communication at large, has a number of consequences for the study of fictionality and for literary theory in general. First, it contributes the insight that literature is similar to other acts of communication. Second, overtly invented stories do not have to follow the rules of non-invented communication. Third, a rhetorical approach to fictionality makes visible the ways in which fiction interacts with and affects reality, in concrete, yet complicated ways.

Investigations into the history of the modern practice of fiction encounter a wide range of obstacles. One of the major impediments lies in the fact that former centuries have used different concepts and terms to designate or describe phenomena or ideas that we, during the last 50 years, have been dealing with under the label of fiction/ality. Therefore, it is not easy to establish whether scholars and poets of other centuries actually do talk about what we today call fiction or fictionality and, if they do, what they say about it. Moreover, even when we detect discourses or propositions that seem to deal with aspects of fictionality we have to be careful and ask whether these propositions are actually intended to talk about phenomena that belong to the realm of fiction/ality. However, if we want to gain some knowledge about the history of fiction/ality, we have no other choice than to tackle the arduous task of trying to detect similarities (and differences) between the present-day discourse on fictionality and (allegedly) related discourses of other epochs. The goal of this paper is to make a small contribution to this task.The starting point of the paper are two observations, which also determine the approach I have chosen for my investigations. 1) In the 18thcentury the terms »fiction« or »fictionality« do not seem to play a significant role in the discussion of art and literature. However, some propositions of the discourse on imagination, one of the most prominent discourses of the Age of Enlightenment, seem to suggest that this discourse deals more or less explicitly with questions regarding the fictionality of literary artefacts as we conceive it today. 2) The concepts of imagination and fictionality are also closely linked in present-day theories of fiction. Naturally, the question arises how the entanglement of the concepts of fictionality and imagination can be understood in a historical perspective. Can it function as a common ground between 18th-century and present-day conceptions of fiction/ality? Is imagination still used in the same ways to explain phenomena of fictionality or have the approaches evolved over the last 250 years and if yes, then how? These kinds of questions inevitably lead to one major question: What do 18th-century and present-day conceptions of fiction/ality have in common, how much and in what ways do they differ?For heuristic reasons, the article is subdivided according to what I consider the three salient features of today’s institutional theories of fiction (i. e. theories which try to explain fictionality as an institutional practice that is determined and ruled by specific conventions): fictive utterance (aspects concerning the production of fictional texts), fictional content (aspects concerning the narrated story in fictional texts) and fictive stance (aspects concerning the reader’s response to fictional texts). The article focusses on the English, French and German-speaking debates of the long 18thcentury and within these discourses on the most central and, therefore, for the development of the concept of fiction/ality most influential figures. These are, most notably, Madame de Staël, Voltaire, Joseph Addison, Georg Friedrich Meier, Christian Wolff, the duo Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger as well as their adversary Johann Christoph Gottsched.The relevance of the article for a historical approach to the theory of fiction lies in the following aspects. By means of a tentative reconstruction of some carefully chosen propositions of 18th-century discourse on imagination I want to show that these propositions deal in some way or other with literary phenomena and theoretical concepts that in present-day theory are addressed under the label of fiction/ality. By comparing propositions stemming from 18th-century discourse on imagination with some major assertions of present-day theories of fiction I try to lay bare the similarities and the differences of the respective approaches to literary fiction and its conceptualisations. One of the major questions is to what extent these similarities and differences stem from the differing theoretical paradigms that are used to explain literary phenomena in both epochs. I venture some hypotheses about the influence of the respective theoretical backgrounds on the conceptions of fictionality then and today. An even more intriguing question seems to be whether the practice of fictional storytelling as we know and conceive it today had already been established during the 18thcentury or whether it was only in the process of being established.

This article explains how literary engagements can function as archives for interpretation. Drawing on hermeneutic and pragmatist philosophy, and Iser's discussions of 'literary anthropology', argues that engagements with literary fiction, when supported with what it describes as a 'Commonplace Book' interpretative structure, can develop personal and collective insight. In addition, the article suggests that these Commonplace Book practices and products show how philosophical, theoretical and literary engagements can create events of pedagogy that are experienced by students and teachers as surprising and purposeful.