Truth, fiction, and literature : a philosophical perspective
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Truth, fiction, and literature : a philosophical perspective
（Clarendon library of logic and philosophy）
Clarendon Press, 1994
Available at / 17 libraries
-
No Libraries matched.
- Remove all filters.
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This study examines the complex and varied ways in which fictions relate to the real world, and offers a precise account of how imaginative works of literature can use fictional content to explore matters of universal human interest. While rejecting the traditional view that literature is important for the truths that it imparts, the authors also reject attempts to cut literature off altogether from real human concerns. Their detailed account of fictionality, mimesis and cognitive value, founded on the methods of analytical philosophy, restores to literature its distinctive status among cultural practices. The authors also explore metaphysical and sceptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world itself is a kind of fiction in science, logic, epistemology and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourse per se is fictional and that different modes of discourse are at root indistinguishable. They offer rigorous analyses of the roles of narrative, imagination, metaphor and "making" in human thought processes.
Both in their methods and in their conclusions, Lamarque and Olsen aim to restore rigour and clarity to debates about the values of literature, and to provide new, philosophically-sound foundations for a genuine change of direction in literary theorizing. Stein Haugom Olsen is the author of "The Structure of Literary Understanding" and "The End of Literary Theory". Peter Lamarque is the editor of "Philosophy and Fiction: Essays in Literary Aesthetics", and subject editor for the ten-volume "Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics".
Table of Contents
- Introduction: setting the scene. Part 1 Fiction and truth: the practice of storytelling
- truth-value and pretence
- content and characters
- reference and "about"
- aspects, points of view and objectivity
- relating internal/external and subjective/objective. Part 2 The limits of fictionality: metaphysics and fictions
- truth-making and world-making
- narrative and imagination. Part 3 Literature and truth: literary practice
- literature and fiction
- the theory of novelistic truth
- the propositional theory of literary truth
- metaphorical truth
- literature as philosophy
- the mimetic aspect of literature
- fiction, literature and value.
by "Nielsen BookData"