Fantomina Is a Theory of Fiction

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?

Despite an intense debate over the past decades the question of whether the concept of fictionality can be regarded as universal or whether it needs to be historicised is still unresolved. The same question applies to the practice (or practices?) of fictionality, which come into focus once an institutional theory of fictionality is applied. In addition to the problem that literary practices can only be reconstructed incompletely for past epochs, it is methodically difficult to determine which practices should be identified, given that the practice of fictionality might have changed over time. One possible solution is to search for historical literary practices displaying similarities to what is regarded as the contemporary practice of fictionality. This article adduces a subtype of medieval German short verse narratives (Mären) as a test case for the scope of this approach and arrives at a twofold result:The controlled anachronism implicit in the approach makes it possible to show that literary practices sketched in someMärendisplay parallels to the contemporary practice of fictionality (in the sense that the truth value of single predications becomes indifferent). This result contributes to our understanding of the history of the practice of fictionality, while placing the parallels in their historical contexts demonstrates that the category of ›fictionality‹ cannot capture the essence of the literary practices relevant toMären.This approach has the advantage of making it possible to describe in a phenomenon-orientated way literary practices only potentially linked to a practice of fictionality before narrowing down the view to pre-defined features of a practice of fictionality. For the textual examples analysed it can thus be shown that the emotional effect of literature, especially the potential to arouse pleasure, is a feature regarded as decisive for the reception of a literary text. This observation opens up further links to research on the fictionality of post-medieval texts, especially the ›paradox of fiction‹.The argument builds on the assumption that we can speak of a practice of fictionality if the truth value of the sentences of a text becomes indifferent for its production and reception. Although this is a definition with universal scope, it is timebound in so far as it highlights that truth concepts depend on a propositional level of a text, while for a medieval audience the ›true meaning‹ of a text would probably have been more important. In the article this problem is illustrated by the genre of exemplary narratives. Of these the subtype ofMärenis singled out in order to study literary practices. This selection is also motivated by the fact that in medieval studiesMärenhave received less attention in debates on fictionality than e. g. Arthurian romances or chronicles.The textual analysis focuses on prologues and other self-reflexive passages from selected late medievalMären, where literary practices are being alluded to in an explicit way. Notwithstanding that these passages do not allow the reconstruction of actual practices, they convey an impression of what was regarded as plausible practices. Truth claims or references to sources in the selectedMärenconfirm that the expectation of truthfulness (whether on the literal or a deeper level) was a kind of default mode for the production and reception of narratives. However, various strategies to undermine this default mode can be observed: in some cases the truth claims are ironically questioned within the texts themselves, in other cases the aesthetic quality and/or the emotional effect of the narratives is foregrounded so that the question of authenticity becomes irrelevant. This strategy suggests a mode of reception that parallels the contemporary practice of fiction as outlined above.Since the capacity of theMärento arouse pleasure is highlighted in the sources, the pre-modern debate ofdelectatioandutilitasis established here as the historical context for the self-reflexive passages of the analysedMären. These categories were discussed in the medieval period in relation to the aspect of ›truthfulness‹, at least in normative theological discourse, and can thus be linked to questions of fictionality. This makes it possible to define a place for a practice of fictionality within a medieval Christian framework, the possibility of which had been doubted in research on medieval concepts of fictionality.On a systematic level, the foregrounding of the emotional effects of literature in someMärenopens up the opportunity to draw parallels to institutional theories of fictionality stressing the need of imaginative engagement with the text on the part of the recipient. The examples suggest that questions such as the ›paradox of fiction‹ should receive attention within a diachronic framework, too, in order to obtain a fuller picture of the history of the practice of fiction.

Prosthetic Grand Synthesis

Acknowledgments.The Contributors.Introduction.Reed Ueda (Tufts University).Introduction.Notes on Contributors.Part I: Historical Contexts and Cultural Issues:.1. The Publishing World: Kelly Mays.2. Education, Literacy, and the Victorian Reader: Jonathan Rose.3. Money, The Economy, and Social Classes: Regenia Gagnier.4. Victorian Psychology: Athena Vretttos.5. Empire, Race, and the Victorian Novel: Deirdre David.6. The Victorian Novel and Religion: Hilary Fraser.7. Scientific Ascendancy: John Kucich.8. Technology and Information: Accelerating Developments: Christopher Keep.9. Laws, The Legal World, and Politics: John Reed.10. Geneer, Politics, and Women's Rights: Hilary Schor.11. The Other Arts: Victorian Visual Culture: Jeffrey Spear.12. Imagined Audiences: The Novelist and the Stage: Reneta Kobetts-Miller.Part II: Forms of the Victorian Novel:.13. Newgate Novel to Detective Fiction: F.S. Scjhwarzbach.14. The Historical Novel: John Bowen.15. The Sensation Novel: Winifred Hughes.16. The Bildungsroman: John R. Maynard.17. The Gothic Romance in the Victorian Period: Cannon Schmitt.18. The Provencial or Regional Novel: Ian Duncan.19. Industrial and 'Condition-of-England's Novels: James Richard Simmons.20. Children's Fiction: Lewis Roberts.21. Victorian Science Fiction: Patrick Brantlinger.Part III: Victorian and Modern Theories of the Novel and the Reception of Novels and Novelists Then and Now:.22. The Receptions of Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy: Elizabeth Langland.23. Victorian Theories of the Novel: Joseph Childers.24. Modern and Postmodern Theories of Prose Fiction: Audrey Jaffe.25. The Afterlife of the Victorian Novel: Novels about Novels: Anne Humpherys.26. The Victorian Novel in Film and Television: Jocelyn Marsh.Index.

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

Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel: A Reader is the first book to collect together the most important contributions to the theory of the postmodern novel over the last forty years and to guide readers through the complex questions and wide-ranging debates: what are its characteristics? Which novels and authors belong to the category? Does it even deserve to be a category on its own? From which traditions does it emerge? How does it relate to previous forms of the novel and to other aspects of postmodern culture? While discussion of the contemporary novel has been dominated by the question of postmodernism, developments in contemporary fiction are also central to the wider debate about postmodernism. Fiction is referred to frequently in the work of postmodernist thinkers not explicitly concerned with literature, like Baudrillard, Lyotard, and Haraway. The selections in this book will also enable readers to place the theory of postmodern fiction in a broader intellectual and cultural context. Key Features Analyses postmodern fiction from both thematic and formal perspectives, giving in-depth coverage to key features and issues such as metafiction, the relation to modernism, history, and politics Features work by some of the most important theorists and critics of the last few decades, such as Ihab Hassan, Jean Baudrillard, Linda Hutcheon, and Brian McHale Provides a sense of historical, social and cultural context to the debate about postmodernism in fiction Gives ample coverage to some of the most compelling issues raised in relation to postmodern fiction in recent years, such as science and new technologies, the cyborg, 'race' and gender

This text primarily deals with Hans Vaihinger?s fiction theory. Emphasizing the central role of scientific fiction in that theory, it attempts to give a critical account of Vaihinger?s philosophical theory of ?As if?. On the one hand, this analysis of the philosophy of ?As if? includes conceptual delimitation between the notion of fiction and concepts of fantasy, hypothesis, and regulatory ideas. On the other hand, it points out to some problems related to Vaihinger?s constructivist-pragmatic approach to the problem of fiction, such as a tendency towards an unreasonable extension of the notion of fiction, and a tendency towards the integration of other forms of fictionality into scientific fiction.

QAnon is a conspiracy collective detailing a supposed secret plot by the “deep state” against US President Donald Trump and his supporters. Their story began with a 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by someone using the name Q, generally referred to as QAnon. Since this first post, Q gained followership in the United States and throughout the “Western” world. Although QAnon followers do appear in public, most of their activities focus on social media. This chapter will argue that some of QAnon’s archetypical elements – such as notions of secret elites and kidnapped children – reflect historical and ongoing antisemitic conspiracy myths. This chapter will first provide an overview of the history and presence of QAnon and investigate the most prevalent forms of antisemitism related to QAnon. Since the antisemitic content of QAnon is often not explicit, the chapter will offer a closer analysis of the antisemitic tropes and give the historical background and context behind this online collective’s narrative.

British theatre underwent a vast transformation and expansion in the decades after World War II. This Companion explores the historical, political, and social contexts and conditions that not only allowed it to expand but, crucially, shaped it. Resisting a critical tendency to focus on plays alone, the collection expands understanding of British theatre by illuminating contexts such as funding, unionisation, devolution, immigration, and changes to legislation. Divided into four parts, it guides readers through changing attitudes to theatre-making (acting, directing, writing), theatre sectors (West End, subsidised, Fringe), theatre communities (audiences, Black theatre, queer theatre), and theatre's relationship to the state (government, infrastructure, nationhood). Supplemented by a valuable Chronology and Guide to Further Reading, it presents up-to-date approaches informed by critical race theory, queer studies, audience studies, and archival research to demonstrate important new ways of conceptualising post-war British theatre's history, practices and potential futures.

Reviewed by: Pynchon’s California ed. by Scott McClintock, John Miller Casey Shoop Scott McClintock and John Miller, eds., Pynchon’s California. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014. 228pp. Paper, $45; e-book, $45. As the proverbial “end” of the nation’s manifest destiny, California has long been overdetermined in the historical imagination: from the land of milk and honey to the land of millenarian last hours. No writer is perhaps more attuned to this ambivalent destiny than Thomas Pynchon, whose novels have repeatedly field-tested its prospects and possibilities. To date he has situated three novels in that fertile territory (The Crying of Lot 49 [1966], Vineland [1990], and Inherent Vice [2009]) and brought two others to rest there (Gravity’s Rainbow [1973] and Against the Day [2006]). The publication of Scott McClintock and John Miller’s edited collection of essays is thus an overdue and much-needed critical exploration of this connection between Pynchon and the place where history is so often presumed to end, for better or worse. Taken together, the essays argue for what Margaret Lynd in the volume’s lead essay calls the “situated knowledges” of Pynchon’s California fiction over against what the editors see as the prevalent critical tendency to read “in the microcosm of California any ‘totalizing’ order of domination by postmodern, late ‘Capital’” (9). The essays demonstrate a wide-ranging and vital attention to the specific historical and regional contexts of Pynchon’s engagement with California. Hanjo Berressem, for example, offers a free-spirited reading of the state’s peculiar ecology in the “California trilogy.” Bill Millard insightfully tracks the sordid political history of land use and real estate through Inherent Vice, while Stephen Hock pursues the emblematic modernity of roads and freeways in Pynchon’s novels toward their ultimate expression in the California highway system. And Lynd finds in the smaller, more character-driven plots of the California novels a modicum of “situated hope” and agency against the rectilinear course of historical catastrophe that propels [End Page 260] Pynchon’s larger world-historical novels (22). In a manner that both complements and diverges from the concerns of those contrapuntal epics, Pynchon’s California makes a persuasive case for the intimacy of historical experience in the California trilogy (the 1960s through the 1980s), the felt-sense of an epoch lived through in tones both promissory and elegiac. At the same time, this attention to the “local, regionally specific and ‘situated’ features of Pynchon’s California fictions” has its limits (9). Writing about California is challenging precisely because of the perceived conflict between the regional and historical specificities of place on the one hand, and the allegorical leveraging of that place into national and international meanings that far exceed it on the other. Rather than privileging one side of this opposition, Pynchon’s California would have benefited from a more dialectical account of the connections between the local and the global that California stages in the period Pynchon’s novels traverse. Posing questions about the relationship between periodization and place in his work makes this need clear: how do Pynchon’s novels imagine the growth of the California information economy that so deeply altered the US labor market? What is the link between Pynchon’s fascination with Hollywood image-culture and the dream-life of capitalism more generally? How does the California rise of Reaganism that so preoccupies Pynchon augur a crisis of faith for the legacy of sixties radicalism not only at Berkeley but also around the world? How do Pynchon’s California novels help us reconceptualize the global phenomenon of postmodernism, a concept that seems so indelibly Californian in its articulation? On this last question, the editors are loath to rehearse the “by now all-too-familiar portrayal of California as a postmodern space of superficiality” and eager to “offer an alternative to the construction of Pynchon as postmodern ironist” (8, 9). I see this reduction of postmodernism to an aesthetic category as something of a lost opportunity for Pynchon’s California: when postmodernism is conceptualized as a periodizing term for the postwar economic and cultural transformations in the capitalist world-system, as in the influential accounts of Fredric...

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.

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 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.

In this paper I use contemporary theories of fiction in order to show that the fiction- as-travel, and especially fiction-as-flight metaphor is used by Lucian as a metafictional signal. Whereas this metaphor has been studied in other metaliterary significations, it may be used to understand Lucian’s conceptions of fiction in texts that explicitly tackle story-telling and lying. Indeed, celestial travels are part and parcel of the structure and themes in these texts. Flight illustrates the acts of telling and listening to a fictional story. Insofar as they lead to faraway lands, aerial movements are metaphors for the access granted by fiction to possible worlds. But celestial travels are particularly speedy, just like fictional immersion must be immediate. The nature of fictional immersion is problematised by flying characters who lose sight of planet Earth. The fall down to Earth is therefore used to illustrate the end of fictional illusion and narrative.

The rhetorical account of fictionality has drawn considerable attention in narratological circles, but the extent to which it is fundamentally at odds with other approaches, despite their diversity, has not been recognised. This essay aims to elucidate the significant departure from all previous contributions to the theory of fiction, achieved by conceiving of fictionality as a resource integral to direct communication, not the quality marking fiction’s detachment from its framing communicative context. It contrasts the concept of fictionality as rhetoric with the main currents in theory of fiction and establishes a basis for scrutinising some open questions within rhetorical approaches, concerning the scope and precise definition of fictionality conceived in this way. It concludes by pointing towards three distinct areas of further research opened up by a rhetorical perspective, relating to the contextual variables of the fiction’s medium, its immediate discursive environment and its cultural and historical juncture.