Abstract

The concepts of fiction and representation are distinct but so closely interrelated that one cannot be understood without the other. Most of the traditional confusions about each have arisen from assuming either that the two are radically disjunct or that they are identical. ;Part One, a methodological introduction, clarifies the important distinction between 'literary' fictions and other kinds of fictions, as well as the one between literariness and fictionality. The traditional paradoxes of fictionality and representativity are then shown to be, not the outer limits of thought, but rather the starting points, stimuli, guides, and monitors on the path to satisfactory understandings of these concepts. ;Part Two investigates the concept of mimesis in Plato and Aristotle within the horizon of our own concepts of imitation and representation, by which means the relation between our concepts of representation and fiction are further clarified. Aristotle's structural conception of mimesis is played off against Plato's ontological conception, and it is shown how Plato's ability to conceive of any kind of representation at all collapses precisely because he insists on submitting everything to the criterion of truth. ;Part Three begins with a critique of two currently popular approaches to fictional discourse: fictional discourses as cases of reference failure, fictional discourses as veridical discourses about various kinds of non-existent entities, including especially possible worlds. All of these approaches fail precisely because they ignore the conceptual interdependency of fictionality and representativity. Although, to date, speech-act theories of fiction have not proved satisfactory, an examination of those failures shows that the fundamental approach is sound and reveals several promising directions, which are pursued in the remainder of the dissertation. It becomes clear that we need to speak of fictional behaviors rather than merely of fictional discourses, and that these fictional behaviors should be treated as something like Wittgensteinian language games. These games can be understood more precisely by taking fictional representations as structures of presuppositions and implicatures, in their sense in linguistic pragmatics, based on mutual knowledge and conventions