Fiction

What does it mean for a text to be transparent? If in order to be considered such, as the Oxford English Dictionary among others tells us, a thing must either be ‘easily seen’ or else ‘easily seen through’, what does this contradiction embedded into the term mean for the reader of transparent things? Vladimir Nabokov engages precisely this line of inquiry in the candidly named 1972 Transparent Things, his penultimate text before his death in 1977. In doing so, the author (...) also articulates a particular understanding of and attraction to transparency which has permeated his body of works since at least the 1920s and which, in this emphatic iteration, serves to complicate the notion of any stability in the roles of ‘authors’ and ‘readers’; to dismantle the dichotomous logic of the categories of ‘surface’ and ‘depth’; and finally to advocate for that which appears as ‘surface’ as the space where writing, reading and criticism is at its most fluid, inventive and kaleidoscopic. (shrink)

"Legitimacy is lost when the police either fail to protect the public or rely on coercion rather than consent to achieve that protection. Recovering Police Legitimacy challenges conventional criminological, political, and public solutions to the problem by approaching it from the bottom up"--.

Literary Theory and Criminology demonstrates the significance of contemporary literary theory to the discipline of criminology, particularly to those criminologists who are primarily concerned with questions of power, inequality, and harm. Drawing on innovations in philosophical, narrative, cultural, and pulp criminology, it sets out a deconstructive framework as part of a critical criminological critique-praxis. -/- This book comprises eight essays – on globalisation, criminological fiction, poststructuralism, patriarchal political economy, racial capitalism, anthropocidal ecocide, critical theory, and critical praxis – that argue (...) for the value of contemporary literary theory to a critical criminology concerned with the construction of a just and sustainable reality in the face of climate change and other mass harms. This is the first criminology book to engage with literary theory from the perspective of criminology and provides a guide for criminologists who want to deploy literary theory as part of their research programmes. It supersedes existing engagements with poststructuralism in the philosophical criminological tradition because it entails neither a constructionist ontology nor a relativist epistemology. It shows criminologists how literary theory offers the tools to first deconstruct and then reconstruct meaning and value. -/- Literary Theory and Criminology is essential reading for all critical criminological theorists. (shrink)

There is increasing pressure on the humanities to justify their value and on criminology to undertake interdisciplinary research. In this book, Rafe McGregor establishes a new interdisciplinary methodology, ‘criminological criticism’, harnessing the synergy between literary studies and critical criminology to produce genuine interventions in social reality. -/- McGregor practices criminological criticism on George Miller’s ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’, Prime Video’s ‘Carnival Row’ and J.K. Rowling’s ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’, demonstrating how these popular allegories provide insights into the harms of sexism, racism (...) and class prejudice. -/- This book proposes a model for collaboration between literary studies and critical criminology that is beneficial to the humanities, the social sciences and society. (shrink)

Criminology has been reluctant to embrace fictional narratives as a tool for understanding, explaining and reducing crime and social harm. -/- In this philosophical enquiry, McGregor uses examples from films, television, novels and graphic novels to demonstrate the extensive criminological potential of fiction around the world. Building on previous studies of non-fiction narratives, the book is the first to explore the ways criminological fiction provides knowledge of the causes of crime and social harm. -/- For academics, practitioners and students, this (...) is an engaging and thought-provoking critical analysis that establishes a bold new theory of criminological fiction. (shrink)

This dissertation examines the practice of categorizing works of art and its relationship to art criticism. How a work of art is categorized influences how it is appreciated and criticized. Being frightening is a merit for horror, but a demerit for lullabies. The brushstrokes in Monet's "Impression, Sunrise" (1874) look crude when seen as a Neoclassical painting, but graceful when seen as an Impressionist painting. Many of the judgments we make about artworks are category-dependent in this way, but previous research (...) has rarely examined in depth the ontological structure of art categories, how they are generated and maintained, and how they function. This dissertation fills this gap. The proposal of this dissertation can be summarized as follows. Categories (especially genres) should be analyzed as clusters of rules that regulate the responses and behaviors of agents in the artworld. The visual mundaneness is a critical reason to consider Duchamp's "Comb" (1916) provocative, given the existence of the readymade as a set of rules that justifies such reasoning. The critical and appreciative practice of which categorization is a part is a social practice of making, declaring, proposing, reforming, and developing rules of appreciation. How we appreciate artworks, and how criticism guides our appreciation, is sensitive to how we categorize artworks. How we categorize artworks is sensitive to what categories have been set up in our community and which categories are active regarding each artwork. (shrink)

The idea that fictions may educate us is an old one, as is the view that they distort the truth and mislead us. While there is a long tradition of passionate assertion in this debate, systematic arguments are a recent development, and the idea of empirically testing is particularly novel. Our aim in this chapter is to provide clarity about what is at stake in this debate, what the options are, and how empirical work does or might bear on its (...) resolution. We distinguish between merely influencing people’s opinions and providing genuine learning, where the latter requires that the source of the change in opinion should be reliable. Other important ideas here are the extent to which authors of fiction may be considered to provide testimony, or something like it, and the possibility of recognizing an unstated purpose in the project of the fictional work. We ask whether fictions can furnish us not merely with ideas but with reasons for believing them, perhaps by constituting thought experiments. We consider whether the focus should be on understanding rather than on knowledge, and whether fictions can inform us about the qualities of another’s experiences. We briefly describe some experimental work of recent decades and suggest that the evidence for learning from fiction is currently meagre. (shrink)

My thesis is that certain non-verbal paintings such as Picasso’s GUERNICA make (simple) arguments. If this is correct and the arguments are reasonably good, it would indicate one way that non-literary art can be cognitively valuable, since argument can provide the justification needed for knowledge or understanding. The focus is on painting, but my findings seem applicable to comparable visual art forms (a sculpture is also considered). My approach largely consists of identifying pertinent features of viable literary cognitivism and then (...) showing how they or close analogues can be applied to non-verbal painting. The two main features are the requirements, first, that the relevant knowledge is provided significantly in virtue of the distinctive essential feature of literary fictions, i.e., their fictionality, and second, that the knowledge stems primarily from the content of the work, not from what the auditor brings to the work. Some ways that literary fiction has been taken to be argumentative are explained, and striking similarities are found between argumentative literary fiction and argumentative painting. Potential objections are addressed, and I examine a proposed way to express, in a schematized format, both the power of an argumentative painting and its relatively simple associated propositional content. (shrink)

This essay discusses Peter Langland-Hassan's approach to "explaining imagination" as it plays out in his recent book of that title. Langland-Hassan offers a theory of “attitude imagining” that avoids positing what he calls a “sui generis cognitive attitude.” This theory attempts to explain things like pretend play, hypothetical reasoning, and cognition of fiction; to explain them using only (what he calls) more “basic” mental states like beliefs and desires; and thus to explain them without positing a distinct cognitive attitude of (...) imagining, as many theorists do (including me). In other words, “attitude imagining,” for Langland-Hassan, is whatever explains those things (except for a distinct cognitive attitude of imagining itself). Despite the theoretical interest of this approach, I argue it is ontologically pennywise and pound foolish: for a slight savings in ontological complexity it dramatically reduces explanatory power. (shrink)

The book Utopia in Dark Romanticism deals with a glorious period of American literature in the first half of the 19th century, but its purpose is not to narrate the history of American literature in the Romantic era, but to reconstruct the geography that was formed with the concept of Utopia in this era.

Based on Husserl’s distinction between mode of living presence (Modus der Leibhaftigkeit) and mode of certainty (Glaubensmodus der Gewißheit), which coincide in normal univocal perception, the paper argues for a distinction between two different types of accordance (Einstimmigkeit) in perceptual experience – local accordance and global accordance. While local accordance is characterized by the unfolding of appearances in agreement with lines of accordance instituted by recent perceptual apprehensions within a certain spatio-temporal domain, global accordance is characterized by the agreement between (...) appearances unfolding in local accordance with previous and simultaneous apprehensions concerning the spatio-temporal surroundings of this domain. As will be shown, to perceive something in local accordance amounts to perceiving it in the mode of living presence, while to perceive something in global accordance amounts to perceiving it in the belief mode of certainty (relative to a certain surrounding). In light of these considerations, an account of the perception of figments and immersion is put forward which does not invoke make-belief or the idea of an as-if-perception. (shrink)

The general topic of this paper is the ontological commitment to so-called "fictitious objects", that is, things and characters of fictional stories, like Sherlock Holmes and Pegasus. Discourse about fiction seems to entail an ontological commitment to fictitious entities, a commitment that is often deemed inconsistent with empirical facts. For instance, "Pegasus is a flying horse" seems to entail "There are flying horses" as well as "Pegasus exists" (according to some widely accepted logical principles). I discuss two solutions that have (...) been proposed in the literature. The first one amounts to rejecting sentences like "Pegasus is a flying horse" as false, at least if they are taken at face value. This solution is called the "story operator strategy". It consists in paraphrasing sentences like "Pegasus is a flying horse" by means of the expression "according to a story" such that they are interpreted as an elliptic formulation of, e.g., "According to a story, Pegasus is a flying horse". I spell out the difficulties of the story operator strategy and opt for a realist ontology of fiction. A novel interpretation of the story operator "according to a story" is given, which is not only consistent with but even sheds new light on such a realist ontology. In particular, it is shown how the story operator can be used as a tool to introduce the so-called "modes of predication distinction" (which is an essential ingredient of many realist ontologies of fiction) in a commonsensical way. (shrink)

Although the fictional domain exhibits a prima facie freedom from real-world moral constraints, certain fictive imaginings seem to deserve moral criticism. Capturing both intuitions, this paper argues for double-standard moralism, the view that fictive imaginings are subject to different moral standards than their real-world counterparts. I show how no account has, thus far, offered compelling reasons to warrant the moral appropriateness of this discrepancy. I maintain that the normative discontinuity between fiction and the actual world is moderate, as opposed to (...) one that leaves fictive engagements wholly exempt from moral evaluations. I propose a way of addressing the gamer’s dilemma that is compatible with a moderate kind of discontinuity. Finally, I contend that the audience is justified in adopting deviant moral attitudes in fictional situations because their consequences largely differ from those that analogous real-world events would have. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a very interesting observation about identity in fiction. I call it the phenomenon of identity without interchangeability. It is the phenomenon that two names that have the same referent cannot be used interchangeably in some context. I argue that the phenomenon of identity without interchangeability holds in the dream context, the fictional context in a narrow sense, and the fictional context in an extended sense. I then show one application of the phenomenon in defending Kendall (...) Walton’s account of fiction against Fred Kroon’s objections to him. (shrink)

Although the character of the “lady detective”is a staple of the cozy mystery genre, we contend that there are no great lady detectives to rival Holmes or Poirot. This is not because there are no clever or interesting lady detective characters, but ratherbecause the concept of greatness is sociallyconstructed and, like coolness, depends on public acclaim and perception. We explore the mechanics of genre formation, arguing that the very structure of cozy mysteries precludes female greatness. To create a “great”character,theauthor cannot (...) just endowher with certain attributes; she must actively work to overcome her audience’s tendency to import structures of oppression into the story, and she must wrestle against the conventions of the genre. In doing so, however, authors risk setting their stories in a wholly different genre. (shrink)

This paper deals with the semantics and meta-semantics for ordinary names in fiction. It has recently been argued by some philosophers that when ordinary names are used in fictional contexts, they change their semantic contents and work as fictional names in general. In this paper, I argue that there is no compelling reason to believe that such reference changes occur and defend the view that whether those names refer to real or fictional objects depends on which semantic intentions speakers have.

Esta entrevista se realizó de forma virtual y audiovisual el 3 de julio de 2021.

Este artículo sistematiza las temáticas abordadas desde la novela policial peruana en el período de los años 1990 hasta el 2013, siendo la violencia social la que más destaca. Para fundamentar esa recurrencia, el autor se basa en fuentes afines que distinguen el corpus según su clasificación. Sociológicamente, se hallan los postulados teóricos como el de posmodernidad de Fredric Jameson y Mario Vargas Llosa, junto con el de criminalidad de Luis Rodríguez Manzanera. En el Perú no se evidencia una taxonomía (...) hegemónica que se tome como referente de la misma. Una de las causas es la escasa documentación acerca de temas policiales, judiciales, históricos y culturales que maneja el propio autor sobre sus obras. Esto se demuestra en el transcurso de este trabajo a través de la recepción crítica, que comprende tres tópicos insoslayables: la demanda del lector con respecto a este género literario, las limitaciones que conllevan el rechazo inconsciente a todo producto valorativo y la implicancia del mercado de la cultura de masas. (shrink)

Consider the opening sentence of Tolkien’s The Hobbit: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. By writing this sentence, Tolkien is making a fictional statement. There are two influential views of the nature of such statements. On the pretense view, fictional discourse amounts to pretend assertions. Since the author is not really asserting, but merely pretending, a statement such as Tolkien’s is devoid of illocutionary force altogether. By contrast, on the alternative make-believe view, fictional discourse prescribes that (...) the reader make-believe the content of the statement. In this paper, we argue that neither of these views is satisfactory. They both fail to distinguish the linguistic act of creating the fiction, for instance Tolkien writing the sentence above, from the linguistic act of reciting it, such as reading The Hobbit out loud for your children. As an alternative to these views, we propose that the essential feature of the author’s speech act is its productive character, that it makes some state of affairs obtain in the fiction. Tolkien’s statement, we argue, has the illocutionary force of a declaration. (shrink)

An introduction to the posthumously published "The Wretched of Middle-Earth: an Orkish Manifesto" by Charles Mills.

Dans l'expérience esthétique, nous éprouvons des émotions au sujet de personnages que nous savons fictionnels. Mais ne faut-il pas croire que quelque chose est réellement arrivé à une personne pour que cela nous émeuve? On trouve une contradiction du même type dans l'expérience religieuse de certains chrétiens : ils disent être émus par Jésus et par ses paroles sans pourtant penser qu'il est réellement le Fils de Dieu. Un autre paradoxe, lié lui aussi à l'usage de fictions, concerne la théorie (...) de la connaissance : comment parvenons-nous à atteindre des résultats corrects tout en utilisant des fictions dans nos raisonnements? L'auteur entend manifester la pertinence du "faire comme si", attitude thématisée la première fois par Kant et développée en détail par le néokantien Hans Vaihinger dans sa Philosophie du comme si (1911), pour élucider ce type de paradoxe. "L'approche par le comme si" de Vaihinger, dont Christophe Bouriau examine les sources et la postérité, établit une médiation entre plusieurs aspects de la philosophie de Kant et certains courants actuels de la philosophie analytique, qu'on regroupe sous le nom de "fictionalisme". (shrink)

A Critical Introduction to Fictionalism provides a clear and comprehensive understanding of an important alternative to realism. Drawing on questions from ethics, the philosophy of religion, art, mathematics, logic and science, this is a complete exploration of how fictionalism contrasts with other non-realist doctrines and motivates influential fictionalist treatments across a range of philosophical issues. Defending and criticizing influential as well as emerging fictionalist approaches, this accessible overview discuses physical objects, universals, God, moral properties, numbers and other fictional entities. Where (...) possible it draws general lessons about the conditions under which a fictionalist treatment of a class of items is plausible. Distinguishing fictionalism from other views about the existence of items, it explains the central features of this key metaphysical topic. Featuring an historical survey, definitions of key terms, characterisations of important subdivisions, objections and problems for fictionalism, and contemporary fictionalist treatments of several issues, A Critical Introduction to Fictionalism is a valuable resource for students of metaphysics as well as students of philosophical methodology. It is the only book of its kind. (shrink)

Que peut-on espérer des fictions? Rien, déclare l'intellectuel traqueur d'illusions. Tout, affirme l'artiste désireux de valoriser les potentialités de son matériau. Mais est-on sûr de parler d'une même chose? À observer nos usages du terme, les fictions prolifèrent confusément à l'époque contemporaine, nichées dans nos oeuvres, nos discours, nos croyances, nos imaginations. Si bien que poser sérieusement la question des mérites et démérites des fictions passe par une clarification rigoureuse de ce qu'elles sont. Les philosophes se sont depuis longtemps attelés (...) à débattre des caractéristiques ontologiques, sémantiques, épistémologiques, ou psychologiques des fictions et à résoudre les paradoxes et difficultés qui s'y rattachent. Perspectives philosophiques sur les fictions rassemble neuf textes contribuant à cette enquête. Le recueil met l'accent sur une approche épistémologique positive des fictions, le 'fictionalisme', sur ses origines chez Hans Vaihinger, ses développements et les critiques qu'on peut lui adresser."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Suppose you’re imagining that it’s raining hard. You then proceed to imagine, as part of the same imaginative project, that you believe that it isn’t raining. Such an imaginative project is possible if the two imaginings arise in succession. But what about simultaneously imagining that it’s raining and that you believe that it isn’t raining? I will argue that, under certain conditions, such an imagining is impossible. After discussing these conditions, I will suggest an explanation of this impossibility. Elaborating on (...) the view outlined in Walton (1990), I will argue that the impossibility follows from the fact that imaginings ‘mimic’ beliefs in aiming at the fictionally true, just as beliefs aim at the true. (shrink)

La ciudad y los perros ha sido expuesta para el análisis de la comunidad hermenéutica durante más de cincuenta años. En ese sentido, es insoslayable recurrir al criterio sistematizador que fundamenta Hans-Georg Gadamer en su texto Verdad y método, que es de utilidad para catalogar y criticar condicionalmente las propuestas que se han desarrollado en torno a la diversidad de representaciones literarias que han sido manifestadas en este libro. Para la efectividad de este trabajo, se asume que este objeto de (...) estudio está comprendido en función de los siguientes tratamientos: la percepción de la realidad real en la obra literaria, su clasificación autobiográfica, la articulación del lenguaje como estilo, la ironía como estrategia discursiva y canalizadora de la violencia y, para terminar, la técnica del final abierto con respecto a la muerte del personaje Ricardo Arana (el Esclavo). Con estos seis planteamientos enfocados desde lo hermenéutico, se pretende producir la confrontación y el diálogo intertextual con los aportes referenciados, con el propósito de que resulte utópica la configuración de un panorama exégeta de la primera novela de Mario Vargas Llosa. (shrink)

Este trabajo retoma las concepciones básicas de la violencia, comprendidas por autores como Benjamín, Domenach, Žižek, Sen, entre otros. El propósito es configurar empíricamente el recorrido de la violencia en La ciudad y los perros. Este procedimiento será graficado con un triángulo jerárquico, en el que se percibirá la orientación cíclica e iterativa de ese indicador negativo. Por lo tanto, se cerciorarán calificativos como los de víctima o afines, que se condicionan a los protagonistas. En ese sentido, este texto cumple (...) la función de revelar las múltiples adaptaciones subjetivas y explicar sus razones. (shrink)

In a series of publications, Derek Matravers has challenged what he calls the “consensus view” of the nature of fiction. According to this consensus view, there is a conceptual route that starts with the notion of a prescription to imagine and that ends up with a systematic distinction between fiction and non-fictional representations. This paper engages in a systematic reconstruction of Matravers’ argument against the consensus view as well as a rebuttal of recent rejoinders offered by Gregory Currie and Kathleen (...) Stock. It concludes that the challenge against the consensus view, once properly understood, still stands. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the experience of a literary narrative qua literary narrative is an experience of narrative thickness, i.e. an experience in which narrative form and narrative content are inseparable. I explain my thesis of poetic thickness in §1, showing why it does not admit of extension from poetry to literary narratives. §§2-3 synthesise the work of Derek Attridge and Peter Lamarque, advancing narrative thickness as a necessary condition of literary narratives. I propose a (...) work of didactic literature – J.M. Coetzee’s “The Lives of Animals” – as a paradigmatic counter-example to narrative thickness in §4. I show, in §5, that narrative thickness holds for this work in particular and didactic works which are literary in general, concluding that narrative thickness is indeed a necessary condition of literary narratives. (shrink)

Poe’s experimental fiction revitalizes Hume’s ambivalent empiricism, the complexities of which were sometimes obscured in the philosopher’s nineteenth-century American reception. Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ broaches formally the question of how one thought leads to another, while ‘The Man that Was Used Up’ stages the question of what grounds the unity of one’s thoughts. Reading both tales together exposes the scope and limits of an associationist paradigm often traced back to Hume. But reading Hume through Poe’s verbal art reveals (...) that Hume’s ‘mitigated scepticism’ about personal identity is more difficult to grapple with, and potentially more devastating for Western Reason, than the modes of scepticism that more comfortably entered the English canon. In ‘Rue Morgue’, Detective Dupin’s presumption to reconstruct fully the narrator’s train of thought may be the real locus of the tale’s horror. In the ‘Man that Was Used Up’, the heroic General A.B.C. Smith disintegrates on the floor into a talking ‘bundle’ that parodically literalizes Hume’s most famous metaphor in the Treatise. Hume’s bundle thus reappears in Poe as the proto-surrealist ‘terminus’ of a reductive explanation that has become physically real. To say with Hume that the mind is a ‘fiction’ is not to deny the goings-on of mental phenomena, but to attempt a much more challenging claim: that our minds conceptualize themselves out of their own limited nature, but not in a way that necessarily accords with that nature. If Hume brings out the parody in Poe, we might also say that Poe amplifies the irony in Hume. (shrink)

In her recent book, A Different Order of Difficulty, Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé uses a resolute reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to highlight similarities between Wittgenstein’s work and his contemporaries Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Franz Kafka. On the basis of this reading, she claims that Wittgenstein’s early masterpiece is a modernist work. -/- This article argues that there are profound problems with the resolute reading that she offers, and it suggests that ‘traditional’ readings of the Tractatus survive the criticisms she makes (...) of them. Nonetheless, a case can still be made that Wittgenstein’s work is a modernist one, and it is a useful exercise to compare the Tractatus with modernist works from the 1920s. -/- Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 274-296, July 2022. (NOTE: This article was mistakenly given the title 'Theologico-Philological Investigations: Is Wittgenstein's Tractatus a Modernist Work?' in the print edition of Philosophical Investigations. The online version has been corrected. (shrink)

We critically survey prominent recent scholarship on the question of whether fiction can be a source of epistemic value for those who engage with it fully and appropriately. Such epistemic value might take the form of knowledge (for ‘cognitivists’) or understanding (for ‘neo-cognitivists’). Both camps may be sorted according to a further distinction between views explaining fiction’s epistemic value either in terms of the author’s engaging in a form of telling, or instead via their showing some state of affairs to (...) obtain, a special case of which is the provision of self-knowledge. Fictional works that show rather than tell often employ thought experiments. The epistemic value of some fictional works is indicated by their enabling of empathy, itself illuminated via the psychological process of experience-taking. Whether a fictional work offers epistemic value by telling or showing, there is, in principle, no bar to its being able to deliver on what it offers, and consumers of fiction who exercise epistemic vigilance may gain either knowledge or some degree of understanding from their engagement with it. (shrink)

I am grateful to Catharine Abell and Gregory Currie for their incisive and productive commentaries on Apt Imaginings. In what follows, I will try to respond to.

In his 2014 book Fiction and Narrative, Derek Matravers mounts a concerted attack on what he terms the ‘post-Walton consensus’ as to the features that distingui.

In this paper, I review developments in discussions of fiction and emotion over the last decade concerning both the descriptive question of how to classify fiction-directed emotions and the normative question of how to evaluate those emotions. Although many advances have been made on these topics, a mistaken assumption is still common: that we must hold either that fiction-directed emotions are (empirically or normatively) the same as other emotions, or that they are different. I argue that we should reject this (...) dichotomy. (shrink)

I am grateful to Catharine Abell and Jonathan Gilmore for their comments and for the opportunity to think again about some important questions. Before I respond.

In the old days of descriptivism, fictional reference and non-fictional reference with proper names were treated on a par. Descriptivism was not an intuitive theory, but it meritoriously provided a unitary semantic account of names, whether referentially full or empty. Then the revolution of the new theory of reference occurred. This new theory is definitely more intuitive than descriptivism, yet it comes with a drawback: the referentially full use and the referentially empty use, notably the fictional use, of names are (...) semantically no longer on the same footing. How the use of names from fiction is referentially empty has even been seen as a symptom of its not being a use at all. In this paper, I ask the following question: can one keep the merits of the new theory of reference and still provide a unitary account of both fictional and non-fictional reference with names? My answer is positive, provided that one conceives proper names as a special kind of indexicals. (shrink)

The metaphysical question of what determines the contents of fictive utterances is closely related to the epistemological question of how audiences identify the.

In their engaging and valuable contributions to the philosophy of fiction and literature, Jonathan Gilmore and Gregory Currie address overlapping issues concern.

These two excellent books ask what it is for an audience to engage appropriately with a work of fiction. Catharine Abell argues a radical rethink of foundationa.

Through the last decade of the last millennium, several influential books were published on Fiction, notably among these are Kendall Walton’s Mimesis and Make B.

Each of these books offers a richly developed and nuanced account of the nature of fiction. And each poses major challenges to a view about which there is a near-consensus. Catharine Abell draws on a theory of the institutions of fiction to advance a systematic re-envisioning of the metaphysics and epistemology of the contents of stories. Gregory Currie argues that fiction’s relationship to the imagination, and the way stories communicate their contents to readers, seriously undermine fiction’s cognitive values.

In Fictional Discourse, I proposed an analysis of what I call ‘fictional discourse’, first and foremost as it appears in an author’s fictional creation (what Ta.

What gives life its meaning? This question stands behind every philosophical inquiry, and philosophy itself arises from it. Confronting the problem of meaning is, as Camus says, the fundamental task of human life. Yet at bottom, meaning is an aesthetical category. Meaning hinges on interpretation. It makes sense then to turn to art--and in particular the art form which deals most explicitly with meaning, the novel--if we are to attempt to address it. Inspired by but critical of Roland Barthes's "death (...) of the author" literary theory, The Mask of Memnon seeks to reconcile opposing philosophical approaches to the question of meaning by examining the death of the author from the perspective of the character, not the reader. In this work, the traditional dichotomy between external/objective meaning and internal/subjective meaning is upended and a new paradigm is proposed. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists have argued that fiction can ethically educate us: fiction supposedly can make us better people. This view has been contested. It is, however, rarely argued that fiction can morally “corrupt” us. In this article, we focus on the alleged power of fiction to decrease one's prejudices and biases. We argue that if fiction has the power to change prejudices and biases for the better, then it can also have the opposite effect. We further argue that fictions are (...) more likely to be a bad influence than a good one. (shrink)