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Author: Gregory Currie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521381277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
This important book provides a theory about the nature of fiction, and about the relation between the author, the reader and the fictional text. The approach is philosophical: that is to say, the author offers an account of key concepts such as fictional truth, fictional characters, and fiction itself. The book argues that the concept of fiction can be explained partly in terms of communicative intentions, partly in terms of a condition which excludes relations of counterfactual dependence between the world and the text. This communicative model is then applied to the following problems: how can something be 'true in the story' without being explicitly stated in the text? In what ways does interpreting a fictional story depend upon grasping its author's intentions? Is there always a unique best interpretation of a fictional text? What is the correct semantics for fictional names? What is the nature of our emotional response to a fictional work? In answering these questions the author explores the complex interaction between author, reader, and text. This interaction requires the reader to construct a 'fictional author' - a character in the story whose personality, beliefs and emotional states must be interpreted if the reader is to grasp the meaning of the work.
Author: Gregory Currie
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521381277
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252
Get Book Here
Book Description
This important book provides a theory about the nature of fiction, and about the relation between the author, the reader and the fictional text. The approach is philosophical: that is to say, the author offers an account of key concepts such as fictional truth, fictional characters, and fiction itself. The book argues that the concept of fiction can be explained partly in terms of communicative intentions, partly in terms of a condition which excludes relations of counterfactual dependence between the world and the text. This communicative model is then applied to the following problems: how can something be 'true in the story' without being explicitly stated in the text? In what ways does interpreting a fictional story depend upon grasping its author's intentions? Is there always a unique best interpretation of a fictional text? What is the correct semantics for fictional names? What is the nature of our emotional response to a fictional work? In answering these questions the author explores the complex interaction between author, reader, and text. This interaction requires the reader to construct a 'fictional author' - a character in the story whose personality, beliefs and emotional states must be interpreted if the reader is to grasp the meaning of the work.
Author: Gregory Currie
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 281
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Book Description
Author: Gregory Currie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192636782
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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Book Description
Works of fiction are works of the imagination and for the imagination. Gregory Currie energetically defends the familiar idea that fictions are guides to the imagination, a view which has come under attack in recent years. Responding to a number of challenges to this standpoint, he argues that within the domain of the imagination there lies a number of distinct and not well-recognized capacities which make the connection between fiction and imagination work. Currie then considers the question of whether in guiding the imagination fictions may also guide our beliefs, our outlook, and our habits in directions of learning. It is widely held that fictions very often provide opportunities for the acquisition of knowledge and of skills. Without denying that this sometimes happens, this book explores the difficulties and dangers of too optimistic a picture of learning from fiction. It is easy to exaggerate the connection between fiction and learning, to ignore countervailing tendencies in fiction to create error and ignorance, and to suppose that claims about learning from fiction require no serious empirical support. Currie makes a case for modesty about learning from fiction -- reasoning that a lot of what we take to be learning in this area is itself a kind of pretence, that we are too optimistic about the psychological and moral insights of authors, that the case for fiction as a Darwinian adaptation is weak, and that empathy is both hard to acquire and not always morally advantageous.
Author: Flannery O'Connor
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374217920
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
This collection shows Flannery O'Connor's extraordinary versatility and expertise as a practitioner of the essayistic form. The book opens with "The King of the Birds", her famous account of raising peacocks. There are three essays on regional writing, two on teaching literature, and four on the writer and religion. Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are gems, and their value to the contemporary reader -- and writer -- is inestimable. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Author: Elizabeth-Jane Burnett
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141989637
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
'A subtle, moving celebration of place and connectedness . . . The Grassling brings the sounds, smells and sights of the countryside alive like few other books. Burnett stretches the limits of prose, infusing it with poetic intensity to create a powerful, original voice' PD Smith, Guardian What fills my lungs is wider than breath could be. It is a place and a language torn, matted and melded; flowered and chiming with bones. That breath is that place and until I get there I will not really be breathing. Spurred on by her father's declining health and inspired by the history he once wrote of his small Devon village, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett delves through layers of memory, language and natural history to tell a powerful story of how the land shapes us and speaks to us. The Grassling is a book about roots: what it means to belong when the soil beneath our feet is constantly shifting, when the people and places that nurtured us are slipping away.
Author: Susie Finkbeiner
Publisher: Revell
ISBN: 1493430467
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
"Finkbeiner has deftly written this narrative of ordinary people finding their way, set against a backdrop of global upheaval and war; the characters are realistic and vibrant. Readers looking for realist family stories with a subtle thread of faith . . .will want to read Finkbeiner's latest."--Library Journal starred review *** In 1975, three thousand children were airlifted out of Saigon to be adopted into Western homes. When Mindy, one of those children, announces her plans to return to Vietnam to find her birth mother, her loving adopted family is suddenly thrown back to the events surrounding her unconventional arrival in their lives. Though her father supports Mindy's desire to meet her family of origin, he struggles privately with an unsettling fear that he'll lose the daughter he's poured his heart into. Mindy's mother undergoes the emotional rollercoaster inherent in the adoption of a child from a war-torn country, discovering the joy hidden amid the difficulties. And Mindy's sister helps her sort through relics that whisper of the effect the trauma of war has had on their family--but also speak of the beauty of overcoming. Told through three strong voices in three compelling timelines, The Nature of Small Birds is a hopeful story that explores the meaning of family far beyond genetic code. "A balanced story that's rich with nuance and gentle emotions."--Foreword Reviews "Readers who enjoy the work of Karen Kingsbury will want to take a look."--Publishers Weekly
Author: Kathleen Stock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198798342
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
Only Imagine offers a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, 'fictional truth'. The theory of fictional content Kathleen Stock argues for is known as 'extreme intentionalism'; the idea that the fictional content of a particular work is equivalent to exactly what the author of the work intended the reader to imagine. Historically, this sort of view has been highly unpopular. Literary theorists and philosophers alike have poured scorn upon it. The first half of this book attempts to argue that it should in fact be taken very seriously as an adequate account of fictional truth: better, in fact, than many of its more popular rivals. The second half explores various explanatory benefits of extreme intentionalism for other issues in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. Namely, can fiction give us reliable knowledge? Why do we 'resist' imagining certain fictions? What, in fact, is a fiction? And, how should the imagination be characterised?
Author: Victoria Saramago
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810142619
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Finalist, 2022 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America investigates how fictional works have become sites for the production of knowledge, imagination, and intervention in Latin American environments. It investigates the dynamic relationship between fictional images and real places, as the lasting representations of forests, rural areas, and deserts in novels clash with collective perceptions of changes like deforestation and urbanization. From the backlands of Brazil to a developing Rio de Janeiro, and from the rainforests of Venezuela and Peru to the Mexican countryside, rapid deforestation took place in Latin America in the second half of the twentieth century. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and intervene in these ecological transformations? Through analyses of work by João Guimarães Rosa, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa, Victoria Saramago shows how novels have inspired conservationist initiatives and offered counterpoints to developmentalist policies, and how environmental concerns have informed the agendas of novelists as essayists, politicians, and public intellectuals. This book seeks to understand the role of literary representation, or mimesis, in shaping, sustaining, and negotiating environmental imaginaries during the deep, ongoing transformations that have taken place from the 1950s to the present.
Author: Catharine Abell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192567268
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 254
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Book Description
By taking a distinctively institutional approach, Catharine Abell provides a unified solution to a wide range of philosophical problems raised by fiction. In particular, she draws attention to the epistemology of fiction, which has not yet attracted the philosophical scrutiny it warrants. There has been considerable discussion of what determines the contents of works of fiction, yet few attempts have been made to explain how audiences identify their contents, or to identify the norms governing the correct understanding and interpretation of them. This book answers both metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning fiction in a way that clarifies the relation between them: What distinguishes works of fiction from works of non-fiction? What is the nature of fictive utterances? How do audiences identify the contents of authors' fictive utterances? How does understanding a work of fiction differ from interpreting it? This book develops the first single theory to provide answers to these questions and many more.
Author: Dorrit Cohn
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801865220
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
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.
