Showing papers by "Jonathan Culler published in 2016"

Problems in the theory of fiction

Abstract: "Fiction" is a somewhat problematical notion, more heavily used, it would seem, in the publishing trade and in public libraries than in literary criticism.* It suggests that for readers and editors the most important distinction, when confronted with a piece of writing, is whether it speaks of real situations and events or imagined ones. When you inquire for a title in a bookstore, the clerk is likely to ask you whether it is fiction or non-fiction, and bestseller lists have, for reasons that remain obscure to me, chosen "fiction" and "non-fiction" as the appropriate way of dividing the multifarious corpus of publications. But when you turn from the organizing principles of bookstores, libraries, and bestseller lists to the books themselves, it is not clear how important this distinction is. If you compare books on the fiction bestseller list with those on the non-fiction bestseller list, you are likely to find that many of the latter seem much more fantastically fictional than the former: Thin Thighs in Thirty Days -a seductive fiction; No Bad Dogs-obviously about a fictional world. Certainly, there are many weeks when the non-fiction bestseller list seems more resolutely fictionalmore imaginatively devoted to fantasies designed to gratify the reading public-than the so-called fiction list. But, of course, the term "fiction" when used by publishers, booksellers, and most readers except some theoretically-inclined specialists, designates imaginative prose narratives (novels and short stories)as opposed to poetry, on the one hand, which will not be found in the fiction section, nor on the fiction bestseller list, and to non-fiction on the other. Non-fiction seems to comprise works which either are not narratives, or, if they are narratives, claim to recount historical events of some sort. This terminological situation is somewhat strange: we speak of "fiction-writers," for example, and famous books bear titles such as The Craft of Fiction and The Rhetoric of Fiction. The most general problem of the theory of fiction might therefore be, what is the relationship of the notion of fiction to the qualities of the writings discussed under this heading? What is the role of the notion of fiction in the theory of fiction? Surprisingly, most of the advances in the theory of fiction of the past twenty-five years come from the study not of fiction as a mode, nor even of the novel as a genre, but of something else. For example, Rene Girard's pioneering Deceit, Desire and the Novel studied major European novels as dramas based on the mimetic mechanisms of desire, "triangular desire," in which the subject's desire is constituted as imitation of another desire. But mimetic desire turned out to be