The Distinction of Fiction

Expanding our sense of the possible: Ten theses for possibility studies

“…Fiction can explore worlds as spaces of possibility, foster perspective awareness, and expand our sense of the possible Both literary theorists and philosophers have tended to share Frege's (1892/2008) view that fiction lacks truth value. Cohn (1999), for example, argues that a fictional world 'remains to its end severed from the actual world' (p. 13), and hence, allegedly, fiction is not 'subject to judgments of truth and falsity' (p. 15). The common conceptual opposition between fact and fiction in terms of the actual and the possible, the real and the unreal, prevents us from seeing that fiction can sometimes convey more truthfully than any other means the conditions of possibility of certain events and experiences.…”

‘Without methods’: three female authors visiting the Western Front

“…Rinehart was one of the major contributors to The Saturday Evening Post, a newspaper that sold around two million copies per week in 1913 and which had an audience of around ten million readers. 14 The author had been a curious woman with a developed sense of adventure since she was very young, and she often regretted not being able to see the things that were happening in the world. 15 For this reason, when the conflict in Europe broke out, she knew from the very beginning that she "wanted to go to the war".…”

Las reglas de escritura del prototipo ficcional

“…Instead, we will limit ourselves to explore certain differences between two categories that, despite their vastness, do admit a more rigorous and operative comparison: factual narratives (in this instance, as a paradigmatic case, journalistic narratives) and fictional literary narratives. However, we will not try to delve into this distinction through the usual perspectives (semantic, pragmatic, syntactic-stylistic, narratological) developed since the second half of the 20th century by theorists such as Genette (1990), Cohn (1999), Schaeffer (2013) or Hamburger (1973). Nor will we adjust to the perspectives that the members of GRK 1767.…”

“…Thus, for example, fiction can be conceived as the imitation of a series of human actions that could have happened within the limits of probability and necessity of a certain literary genre, as Aristotle says in his Poetics. In the same way, literary fiction can be interpreted as allegorical metacodification (Heraclitus, 2005 andPorphyry, 1983); as a certain plane of existence subject to a series of specific ontological dependencies (Thomasson, 1999); as the intentional elaboration of a series of modal structures (Doležel, 1998); in terms of illocutionary pretense (Searle, 1975); as a mimetic display of illocutionary force (Ohmann, 1971); as a succession of indirect speech acts (Genette, 1993); in terms of games of make-believe (Walton, 1990) or as a non-referential narrative that presents a series of differentiated stylistic and narratological features (Cohn, 1999), among others. To this should be or even hybrid genres such as essays, memoirs or autofictions, will always be more or less subject to real-world states of affairs, which implies limits on their enunciation.…”