The Trouble with Poetic License

2018

Possible and narrative worlds are traditionally the most influential tools for explaining our understanding of fiction. One obvious implication of this is considering fiction as a matter of pretence. The theory I offer claims that it is a mistake to take truth as a substantial notion. This view rejects possible worlds and pretence as decisive features in dealing with fiction. Minimalist theory of fiction offers a solution that gives a way to combine a philosophical theory of meaning and views of literary theory. Narrative worlds approach saves its usefulness since its focus is more in the psychological process of reading. Minimalist theory of fiction is based on the minimal theory of truth and the use theory of meaning. The idea of language games as a practice of constructing contextual meanings is also decisive. A sentence is not true because it corresponds to a fact but because it is used in a right way in certain circumstances. The rejection of the possible worlds approach is thu...

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2010

In the contemporary analytic philosophy of literature and es­pecially literary theory, the paradigmatic way of understanding the beliefs and attitudes expressed in works of literary narrative fiction is to attribute them to an implied author, an entity which the literary critic Wayne C. Booth introduced in his influential study The Rhetoric of Fiction. The aim of this paper is to suggest that although the implied author sheds light on certain type of literary narratives, it is insufficient in a so-­called conversational interpreta­tion, which emphasizes the truth-­claims conveyed by a fiction. In my paper, I shall show that, first, from an ontological point of view, truth­-claims or actual assertions in fiction, if any, have to be attributed to the actual author and, sec­ond, that the question of truth-­claiming in and by fiction is an epistemological matter concerning the actual intentions of the author.

Philosophical Studies, 1974

1990

Narrative Factuality: A Handbook, 2019

In this paper, I shall examine two types of assertions in literary narrative fiction: direct assertions and those I call literary assertions. Direct assertions put forward propositions on a literal level and function as the author’s assertions even if detached from their original context and applied in so-called ordinary discourse. Literary assertions, in turn, intertwine with the fictional discourse: they may be, for instance, uttered by a fictional character or refer to fictitious objects and yet convey the author’s genuine assertions. The structure of the paper is twofold. The first, descriptive part is a question–answer type of discussion in which I shall introduce general philosophical arguments against assertions in fiction and present counter-arguments to them, paving the road to my account of literary assertions. In the second, argumentative part, in turn, I shall examine the nature of literary assertions, such as their semantic and ‘aspectival’ characteristics and their peculiar illocutionary force as well as the reader’s stance toward them.

Imaginative resistance (IR) is rejecting as false some fictionally true claim in a story. Accounts of IR hold that readers exit a fiction at points of resistance. But if perceived falsehoods disengage one from a fiction, then some types of learning from fiction don't occur. However, some cases of learning moral norms from fiction are instances of accepting a prescription one previously believed false. My fix is poetic license. The more poetic license granted a work, the more flexible one is regarding perceived falsehoods. One thereby has the chance to stay engaged and possibly learn norms one previously denied.

Nexus: International Henry Miller Journal, 2009

Hagberg/A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, 2009

Thanks, everybody, for staying 'til the last panel. As we've seen earlier this weekend, we don't have a consensus definition of fiction or fictionality. There's at least one thing wrong with all the existing theories. The traditionalist view that nonfictional text is about the true, actual world while fictional text creates a non-actual one, which is made most rigorously in possibleworlds theory, is undermined by postmodern theory, which illustrates the problems in making such distinctions and (I quote Linda Hutcheon here) "seriously question[s] who determined and created the truth" (116). To take one example, if we compare a Great-Man history of a period with a novel about that era's ordinary people, it's hard to say whose textual world is closer to the actual world. Yet as Marie-Laure Ryan argues, that position can clearly go too far, as its logical extension into "panfictionality," in which no distinction between fiction and nonfiction is possible, is built on a faulty syllogism-that, since representations and fictions are both artifices, representations must be fictions (180)-and, as others have pointed out (say, Eric Berlatsky), it's ethically problematic, since reference to a true historical world as over an ideological representation is rhetorically necessary for, say, marginalized populations to make their cases against dominant culture (26)(27)(28)(29)(30)(31)(32)(33)(34). Similarly, John Searle's pretense theory of fiction and Dorrit Cohn's signposts approach effectively dismantle each other. It is absolutely true, as Cohn writes, that most works of fiction are not "pretending" to be "serious" language because their formal peculiarities would make them really awkward for real-world communication (21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27) 117), but it is equally true, as Searle points out, that "any sentence whatever can occur in a work of fiction" (324), and hence stylistic signposts can't consistently distinguish the two. The rhetorical approach, meanwhile, defines fiction as "a communicative resource" (Walsh 36) , but what such discourse purportedly communicates is unclear, because either it must depend upon the realworld communicators being entirely consistent and competent in a large variety of Gricean 1