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Fictionalism

Christopher Pincock

in Mathematics and Scientific Representation

Fictionalism about mathematics is the view that we can use mathematics in science and yet not believe that our mathematical claims are true. This chapter critically evaluates some of the most ... More

Fictionalism about mathematics is the view that we can use mathematics in science and yet not believe that our mathematical claims are true. This chapter critically evaluates some of the most important versions of fictionalism. It begins by considering the leading options for making sense of literary fictions and argues that engaging with a literary fiction does not present any evidence for how things are in the real world. This point is then used to criticize fictionalism about mathematics and a related fictionalist position about scientific models. Another objection is that the fictionalist has yet to clarify the rules for exporting well-supported claims from the fiction in the scientific case. This suggests that fictionalists are not able to make sense of the contributions delineated in part one of the book.Less

Coda: Literature and the Contemporary Zombie | The Appropriate Monster

Tim Lanzendörfer

in Books of the Dead: Reading the Zombie in Contemporary Literature

The coda explores what the book takes to be the most expansive question about contemporary zombie fiction, its meaning for literature at large. It departs from the question of whether we will be able ... More

The coda explores what the book takes to be the most expansive question about contemporary zombie fiction, its meaning for literature at large. It departs from the question of whether we will be able to read literature again without the zombie, and takes zombie fiction, in its many manifestations but especially in its appearance in ostensibly “literary” fiction, as a crucial part of the contemporary generic turn, and as a harbinger of the future of fiction. More than that, however, it suggests that the processes at work in zombie fiction prefigure a larger shift in the literary field, one which ultimately depends on the zombie’s capacity to broadly signal possibility, rather than symbolic meaning.Less

Invention of the Novel: From Stage Act and Temple Ritual to Literary Text

Mark R. E. Meulenbeld

in Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel

This chapter examines the invention of the academic discipline of Chinese literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It challenges some of the predominant notions in the field ... More

This chapter examines the invention of the academic discipline of Chinese literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It challenges some of the predominant notions in the field of literary studies, arguing that it was during these decades that the traditional term xiaoshuo came to be equated with a modern, secular understanding of literary fiction in general and of the novel in particular. It considers how this usage of xiaoshuo has divorced vernacular narratives of the late Ming dynasty from the environment where they have always been most tangibly present: temples, rituals, theater acts, and the gods they embodied. It also explains how the academic shift away from the sphere of religion has resulted in a narrow understanding of these narratives exclusively as (literary) texts instead of as the cultural nexus of legend, divinity, ritual, and community. The chapter concludes by discussing the attempt by Chinese reformist intellectuals to make the novel the battleground for modernity.Less

Tales of Hypnotic Crime

Stefan Andriopoulos

in Possessed: Hypnotic Crimes, Corporate Fiction, and the Invention of Cinema

This chapter analyzes competing late nineteenth-century medical theories of “suggestion” to establish the constitutive role of literary fiction for the lively scientific debate about hypnotic crimes. ... More

This chapter analyzes competing late nineteenth-century medical theories of “suggestion” to establish the constitutive role of literary fiction for the lively scientific debate about hypnotic crimes. Whereas Jean-Martin Charcot and his disciples denied the possibility of so-called criminal suggestions, the physicians of the Nancy school substituted literary stories for actual cases within their treatises about hypnotism and crime. At the same time, narratives and novels such as Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla or Gregor Samarow's Under a Foreign Will cited the forensic debate about the irresistible power of suggestion, thereby imbuing the literary description of possessed bodies with scientific legitimacy. The enormously popular tales of hypnotic crime accordingly emerged from a mutual exchange of rhetorical tropes, scientific concepts, and narrative patterns among law, literature, and medicine. Juridical, literary, and medical representations of criminal suggestion mutually presupposed and engendered each other.Less

Narratives

Joanna Gavins

in Text World Theory: An Introduction

This chapter focuses on prototypical narrative discourse: literary fiction. It examines two extracts from two examples of contemporary prose fiction. The discussion then extends into an exploration ... More

This chapter focuses on prototypical narrative discourse: literary fiction. It examines two extracts from two examples of contemporary prose fiction. The discussion then extends into an exploration of the manipulation of certain narrative structures for particular effects in both literary and non-literary contexts.Less

Casting in Bold Relief

Catherine Z. Elgin

in True Enough

Laboratory experiments, thought experiments, and literary fictions are felicitous falsehoods. They distance themselves from the facts they bear on to screen out irrelevant, potentially confounding ... More

Laboratory experiments, thought experiments, and literary fictions are felicitous falsehoods. They distance themselves from the facts they bear on to screen out irrelevant, potentially confounding factors. This enables them to exemplify, and provide epistemic access to features that would otherwise be obscured.Less

Perspectives on Metaphor and Literary Fiction

in Michel Tournier and the Metaphor of Fiction

This chapter discusses metaphor in literary fiction in the context of French author Michael Tournier's works. It offers an argument rooted in the presupposition that the study of metaphor helps ... More

This chapter discusses metaphor in literary fiction in the context of French author Michael Tournier's works. It offers an argument rooted in the presupposition that the study of metaphor helps considerably in the evolution of a theory of the imagination and considers an interpretation of Tournier's child-centred narrative policy as a logical refinement of the reasoning behind his original choice to deal in myths. The chapter also provides three relevant case studies, which include Paul Ricoeur's theory of metaphor as imagination, Jean Ricardou's writing on the all-pervasiveness of metaphor in both literary and non-literary discourse, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's universalist theory of metaphor as the primary organizer.Less

Postscript: Literary Fiction on the Edge

Asha Rogers

in State Sponsored Literature: Britain and Cultural Diversity after 1945

This short concluding essay revisits the main ideas explored in this book, including the material and symbolic entanglements of state support and literature’s special capacity to represent the full ... More

This short concluding essay revisits the main ideas explored in this book, including the material and symbolic entanglements of state support and literature’s special capacity to represent the full range of voices and experiences now comprising modern Britain. Mindful of the intersecting political, social, and economic pressures shaping literary value and the vacillation between recognition and disavowal characteristic of the state’s engagements with literature, it turns to two recent reports of the state and fate of contemporary literary writing: Literature in the 21st Century (2017) and Writing the Future:Black and Asian Writers and Publishers in the UK Marketplace (2015).Less

Nadeem Aslam

Sara Upstone

in British Asian Fiction: Twenty-first Century Voices

In his three novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and The Wasted Vigil (2008), Nadeem Aslam fuses conventional postcolonial themes and literary techniques with a ... More

In his three novels, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) and The Wasted Vigil (2008), Nadeem Aslam fuses conventional postcolonial themes and literary techniques with a distinctly British sensibility. Born in Pakistan in 1966, he came with his parents to Britain at the age of fourteen, where the family settled in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, and has described himself as ‘a Pakistani man living in Britain’. Yet, elsewhere, Aslam is described as ‘Pakistani-British’. This personal history embodies his dual positioning as both British Asian and postcolonial migrant author. In many senses, Aslam, rather than embodying the qualities of British Asian literature, is part of the publishing storm surrounding postcolonial writers that developed in the 1990s. He is evidence of how, to consider British Asian authors simply in relation to an ethnic literature (whether defined as British Asian, Black British or postcolonial) is to neglect wider paradigms in contemporary literary fiction: not just British, but also international.Less

Freud’s Cases

Arne Höcker

in The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives from Goethe to Kafka

This chapter assesses Sigmund Freud's case histories in his 1895 Studies on Hysteria. Far from removing literature from the psychological context, Freud shifts the focus regarding the function of ... More

This chapter assesses Sigmund Freud's case histories in his 1895 Studies on Hysteria. Far from removing literature from the psychological context, Freud shifts the focus regarding the function of literary fiction for psychological cognition from authorship to form. The question of literary form initially appears in Freud in connection with his case histories on hysteria and with the problem of casuistic representation. Freud, however, reverses the prevalent criminological perspective when he notes a certain proximity of his own scientific case histories to literature. This comparison concerns less the scientific value of Freud's case histories than it does literary fiction and its reality value, and, thus, his contribution to new conceptions of literary realism.Less

Conclusion: Literary Reference and Authorship

Arne Höcker

in The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives from Goethe to Kafka

This chapter explains that, without any doubt, Goethe's and Moritz's novels as well as Schiller's and Kleist's novellas are part of today's German literary canon. But just as certainly, this literary ... More

This chapter explains that, without any doubt, Goethe's and Moritz's novels as well as Schiller's and Kleist's novellas are part of today's German literary canon. But just as certainly, this literary canon did not yet exist around 1800. It cannot even be assumed that the writers of these texts considered themselves literary authors. Werther and Anton Reiser conceal Goethe's and Moritz's authorship, and instead frame their novels by means of a fictitious editorship. In Schiller's and Kleist's novellas, the reference to the truthfulness of the story and the historically documented origin of the material have a similar function. What might have been the premises of and motivations for writing about cases for Goethe, Moritz, Schiller, and Kleist when we assume that they did not write as literary authors? The reading of their cases as literary fiction obscures the fact that these novels and novellas might just as well be understood as vehicles for lawyers, medical doctors, pedagogues, and philanthropists to inform each other about the legal and mental status of the individual and, thus, to continue the medical and legal traditions of thinking, arguing, and writing in cases. And yet the close reading of these texts shows that in them the representation of cases began to change.Less

Recomposing the past: trauma and improvisation in Toni Morrison's Jazz and Jackie Kay's Trumpet

Anne Whitehead

in Trauma Fiction

This chapter views the conceptualisation of literature as a way of ‘working-through’, which consequently involves its own potential risks, and stresses that writing must not forget the challenge that ... More

This chapter views the conceptualisation of literature as a way of ‘working-through’, which consequently involves its own potential risks, and stresses that writing must not forget the challenge that trauma causes to representation. It argues that literary fiction provides the freedom and flexibility to be able to express the resistance and impact of trauma. The chapter also analyses two important works of fiction that draw on the forms of jazz to suggest the transition from trauma to recovery.Less

The New Scottish Renaissance?

Scott Hames

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 7: British and Irish Fiction Since 1940

This chapter examines the boom in Scottish literary fiction during the 1980s and 1990s, and the rhetoric of its presentation as a ‘new renaissance’. With this label came remarkably strong claims for ... More

This chapter examines the boom in Scottish literary fiction during the 1980s and 1990s, and the rhetoric of its presentation as a ‘new renaissance’. With this label came remarkably strong claims for the political efficacy of the contemporary literary novel — a phenomenon that has not attracted the interest it deserves from literary historians outside Scotland. In the two decades prior to devolution, the emergence of formally ambitious Scottish novelists sponsored a conflation of fiction and democracy which figured the novel as the locus of national self-representation and reinvention. While there is clear evidence of these writers’ influence on the self-image of post-devolution Scotland, a closer examination of their fiction and its staging of ‘Scottishness’ complicates any straightforward affiliation with cultural nationalism. The ‘new renaissance’ discourse, this chapter suggests, both inflates the social impact of these novelists and delimits the politics of their writing to the display of suppressed ‘identity’.Less

Introduction

Arne Höcker

in The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives From Goethe to Kafka

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how representing cases in fictional narrative became an important touchstone for the development of German literature. The concept case refers to a ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how representing cases in fictional narrative became an important touchstone for the development of German literature. The concept case refers to a particular way of thinking, administrating, and classifying that has gained epistemic relevance in various disciplinary and institutional settings. In the most general terms, a case allows the making of connections between a specific, discrete incident that it reports and a general form of knowledge to which it contributes. The particular way a case fulfills its function depends on the disciplinary context in which it appears; criminal cases are used for purposes different from medical or psychological cases. The chapter then looks at the constitutive contribution of case narratives to the establishment of new scientific disciplines, in particular empirical psychology and, more important, the formation of an autonomous discourse of and about literary fiction from the late eighteenth century onward.Less

Conclusion: The Fiction of Authority

Arne Höcker

in The Case of Literature: Forensic Narratives from Goethe to Kafka

This chapter explains that while literary texts in the nineteenth century continued the convention of referencing historical cases, they did so in order to question institutional authority and to ... More

This chapter explains that while literary texts in the nineteenth century continued the convention of referencing historical cases, they did so in order to question institutional authority and to criticize the epistemological foundations and the legitimacy of legal judgments informed by psychological narrative. A scene from Hoffmann's “The Story of Serapion” in The Serapion Brethren may exemplify this new status of literary fiction in the nineteenth century. Hoffmann's rigorous rejection of medical authority in the analysis of states of mind for the purpose of legal decision making shows his deep concern about the predictability of the law and the dangers of compromising legal authority with knowledge based on philosophical speculation. Literary fiction, according to Hoffmann's rendering of romantic authorship, develops in opposition to psychological rationality and its claim to objectivity: poetical talent is based on methodological madness. This model of authorship, on the one hand, assigns to literary authors a special ability to depict questionable states of mind, and on the other hand locates this ability in authors' own special psychological intuition.Less