Abstract

Since classical antiquity, philosophers and theorists of criticism have made many efforts to explain the distinction between fiction and fact. None of these explanatory ventures has proven fully satisfying, however, and the problem remains an open one today. This dissertation offers an extended critical treatment of both ancient and contemporary ideas about fictionality, with an outline of a new theory of fiction. ;The first chapter traces the emergence of the problem, beginning with early Greek poetry and historiography, extending through Presocratic and Platonic thought, and culminating in a detailed study of Aristotle's Poetics. The ideas which Aristotle first formulated about the fact/fiction distinction are found, in the other chapters, to have been very elaborately extended by later theorists, but at the same time the conceptual weaknesses of those ideas are found to have persisted as well, down to the modern work of Northrop Frye and various phenomenological and semiological theorists of literature: this material is surveyed in the second chapter. The third chapter makes the argument that a fresh approach to the analysis of fiction, showing its difference from factual discourse, has been made possible by the development of the philosophy of logic by Gottlob Frege and his successors; an exposition and critique of this work leads up to the suggestion that a satisfactory theory of fictional discourse can best be provided within the framework of a systematic theory of meaning, of the kind which recent philosophers of language have postulated; and this chapter ends with a discussion of the basic elements which such an analysis would involve