Fictional Discourse

Drawing on insights from literary theory and analytical philosophy, this book analyzes the intersection of law and literature from the distinct and unique perspective of fictional discourse. Pursuing an empirical approach, and using examples that range from Victorian literature to the current judicial treatment of rap music, the volume challenges the prevailing fact–fiction dichotomy in legal theory and practice by providing a better understanding of the peculiarities of legal fictionality, while also contributing further material to fictional theory’s endeavor to find a transdisciplinary valid criterion for a definition of fictional discourse. Following the basic presumptions of the early law-as-literature movement, past approaches have mainly focused on textuality and narrativity as the common denominators of law and literature, and have largely ignored the topic of fictionality. This volume provides a much needed analysis of this gap. The book will be of interest to scholars of legal theory, jurisprudence and legal writing, along with literature scholars and students of literature and the humanities.

Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics combines the insight of linguistic and philosophical semantics with the study of fictional language. Its central idea is familiar to anyone exposed to the ways of narrative fiction, namely the notion of a fictional teller. Starting with premises having to do with fictional names such as 'Holmes' or 'Emma', Stefano Predelli develops Radical Fictionalism, a theory that is subsequently applied to central themes in the analysis of fiction. Among other things, he discusses the distinction between storyworlds and narrative peripheries, the relationships between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, narrative time, unreliability, and closure. The final chapters extend Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse, as Predelli introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.

Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics combines the insight of linguistic and philosophical semantics with the study of fictional language. Its central idea is familiar to anyone exposed to the ways of narrative fiction, namely the notion of a fictional teller. Starting with premises having to do with fictional names such as 'Holmes' or 'Emma', Stefano Predelli develops Radical Fictionalism, a theory that is subsequently applied to central themes in the analysis of fiction. Among other things, he discusses the distinction between storyworlds and narrative peripheries, the relationships between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, narrative time, unreliability, and closure. The final chapters extend Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse, as Predelli introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.

Providing both the practical steps for doing discourse analysis and the theoretical justifications for those steps, this book shows students how the social world revolves around talk and text. The authors draw on conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, and the discursive approach developed in social psychology. The book presents actual examples, covers data collection methods and strategies for data analysis, and addresses issues of reliability and validity.

This book focuses on ideology and its function in fictional discourse, exploring the link between textual ideologies and real ideologies in text-production environments. It attempts this through a specific focus on the social and linguistic elements that control the presence, the use, and the presentation of ideology, and also the way in which linguistic elements are controlled and manipulated by the collective consciousness of the text producer. This correlation between fictional discourse and ideology is revealed through a series of chapters that cover four closely interrelated areas, focusing specifically on Malaysian and Singaporean fiction. Firstly, the positioning of Malaysian and Singaporean literatures in English as individual literary traditions. This is to counter the non-recognition of Malaysian and Singaporean literatures as individual traditions in spite of five decades of independence. Secondly, establishing a contextual (socio-cultural and political) framework as a basis for discussion on real ideology, arguing that Malaysian and Singaporean writers have moved beyond the anti-western nationalistic stage and on to more personal and communal concerns such as race relations, identity and a sense of belonging. Thirdly, rationalising the social structures of ideology that are likely to be found in the Malaysian and Singaporean social milieus, especially location and text-specific social variables of ideology. Lastly, it seeks to reveal a linguistic-oriented approach for the study of textual ideologies and for linking textual ideologies to ideologies in the overall text production environment. The book ultimately shows the significant possibilities of systematic links between textual ideology, and the real ideology in the text production environment, through what can best be termed as ideological stylistics. In doing so, it aims to contribute significantly to studies of ideology in general and more specifically on ideology on Malaysian and Singaporean literatures in English.

Winner of the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies The border between fact and fiction has been trespassed so often it seems to be a highway. Works of history that include fictional techniques are usually held in contempt, but works of fiction that include history are among the greatest of classics. Fiction claims to be able to convey its own unique kinds of truth. But unless a reader knows in advance whether a narrative is fictional or not, judgment can be frustrated and confused. In The Distinction of Fiction, Dorrit Cohn argues that fiction does present specific clues to its fictionality, and its own justifications. Indeed, except in cases of deliberate deception, fiction achieves its purposes best by exercising generic conventions that inform the reader that it is fiction. Cohn tests her conclusions against major narrative works, including Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu, Mann's Death in Venice, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Freud's case studies. She contests widespread poststructuralist views that all narratives are fictional. On the contrary, she separates fiction and nonfiction as necessarily distinct, even when bound together. An expansion of Cohn's Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton and the product of many years of labor and thought, The Distinction of Fiction builds on narratological and phenomenological theories to show that boundaries between fiction and history can be firmly and systematically explored.