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Fictions and Reality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Colin Falck
Colin Falck
Affiliation:
Syracuse University (London Centre)
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Extract

A literary text or fiction, while making use of the referential or descriptive resources of our ordinary language, nevertheless does not make use of them in a referential or a descriptive manner. Reference may indeed seem to be made to persons or circumstances or events, in the sense that such things are mentioned in the literary text and may even be linked together by it into some kind of a story. Reference is not made to them, in the sense that these persons or circumstances or events have no existence in the actual world in which the text is written or read, or else that it is irrelevant to the nature of the text as a piece of literature if they do have such an existence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 63 , Issue 245 , July 1988 , pp. 363 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1988

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References

1 See for example Walton, Kendall L., (1) ‘Pictures and Make-Believe’, Philosophical Review 82 (1973), 283–319CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and (2) ‘Fearing Fictions’, Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978), 5–27Google Scholar; Lewis, David, ‘Truth in Fiction’, American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978), 37–46Google Scholar; Evans, Gareth, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford University Press, 1982), Ch. 10.Google Scholar

2 Walton, (1), 287et seq., and (2), 12.Google Scholar

3 Lewis, , 40.Google Scholar

4 Evans, , 343Google Scholar; author's italics.

5 Walton, (2), p. 26Google Scholar. Walton acknowledges Lewis's concurrence on this point.

6 See for example Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957), 270et seq.Google Scholar

7 Lewis, , 40.Google Scholar

8 This is the case with Lewis, for example.

9 Lewis, , 44.Google Scholar

10 It would be possible to see in the ‘make-believe’ or ‘pretending’ analysis of literature a survival of something of the positivistic spirit of certain literary discussions of the nineteen-twenties. See for example I. A. Richards's distinction between ‘the scientific use of language’ and ‘the emotive use of language’ in Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1924).Google Scholar

11 ‘The Cow in Apple Time’ is reprinted by permission of the Estate of Robert Frost, Edward Connery Latham as editor, and Henry Holt and Company, Inc. (New York) and Jonathan Cape Ltd. (London), from The Poetry of Robert Frost. © The Estate of Roben Frost.

12 Taylor, Charles, Hegel (Cambridge University Press, 1975), 474–475.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 See Knights, L. C., ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’, in Explorations (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958).Google Scholar

14 Forster, E. M., Howards End, opening line.Google Scholar

15 Yeats, W. B., ‘Leda and the Swan’, 11. 1–2.Google Scholar

16 Barfield, Owen, Poetic Diction (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 113, n. 1.Google Scholar

17 See Shelley, P. B., A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Works, Vol. 7, Forman, H. B. (ed.) (London: Reeves and Turner, 1880), 103.Google Scholar

18 Schiller, Friedrich, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Wilkinson, Elizabeth M. and Willoughby, L. A. (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967)Google Scholar, Twenty-Sixth Letter, and passim.

19 See for example Gombrich, Ernst, Art and Illusion (London: Phaidon Press, 1977), passim.Google Scholar

20 See Langer, Susanne K., Feeling and Form (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), Ch. 13 et seq.Google Scholar

21 Schiller, , Twenty-Sixth Letter, para. 5.Google Scholar

22 I am grateful to Jerry Valberg for reading an earlier version of this argument and for making helpful suggestions.