Unreliable Narration With a Narrator and Without

The article outlines an explication of the concept of ›mimetically unreliable narration‹ i. e. the idea that a fictional narrative is reliable if it gives an unobjectionable account of the fictional facts, and unreliable, if it does not. While we agree with the majority of contemporary narratology that a narrator can be distrusted in a number of different ways, we argue that the diversity of mimetical unreliability runs deeper than is generally acknowledged. There is a distinction to be made that is based on the question whether the unreliable narration has, or has not, a narrator in the first place. Thus we claim that there are two kinds of mimetically unreliable narrations: ones with a narrator and ones without a narrator. The paper explains this distinction and defends it against a number of objections. In the introduction of our paper, we argue for the assumption that not every fictional narrative has a fictional narrator by drawing on a certain understanding of fictionality According to the so-called ›institutional Theory of Fiction‹, fictional texts ask their readers to adopt a particular, rule-governed attitude of reception towards the text. Adopting this attitude means, centrally, to treat the sentences of the text as an invitation to imagine certain things. Some fictional texts invite their readers to imagine that there is a fictional narrator. This means that the text prompts us to imagine that we are reading or listening to someone's narrative. Some fictional narratives do not prompt us to imagine anything of the text of the work or about a teller. Instead, these narratives require us to merely use the sentences of the work as a prop to imagine certain things based on their content. Based on this observation, we argue that both kinds of fictional narratives can be mimetically unreliable and propose to clarify the concept of mimetical unreliability as follows: The narration expressed by a literary work is mimetically unreliable if, and only if, the work authorizes imagining that the narrator does not provide completely accurate information, or the work does not authorize imagining that there is a narrator; instead it seemingly, or prima facie , authorizes imagining states of affairs that are not completely accurate. We elaborate on the components of this proposal, dwell on some of its apparent problems, comment on several competing understandings of unreliability in fictional narratives, discuss the question whether it should be seen as a comparative or as a classificatory term, and briefly address the concept's ascription in the context of textual interpretation. The distinction between unreliable narrations with a narrator and without is not meant to replace other current distinctions between varieties of unreliability in fictional narratives. The main interest of our proposal lies in the way it uses the theory of fiction in order to shed light on narrative unreliability. Narrative unreliability, in our view, is a complex phenomenon in that its explanation presupposes some such theoretical underpinning

Is zero focalization reducible to variable internal and external focalization?

Ist Nullfokalisierung etwas anderes als (variable) interne und/oder externe Fokalisierung? Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass dies durchaus der Fall ist: Legt man die durch Genette popularisierte Theorie von Fokalisierungstypen zugrunde, so ist Nullfokalisierung nicht auf interne oder externe Fokalisierung zurückführbar. Dasselbe gilt, wenn die Genette'sche Theorie der Fokalisierung durch eine plausiblere Alternativtheorie ersetzt wird. Der Beitrag erläutert und begründet diese Thesen

Fiction, Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of the Self

The claim that literary fiction is a valuable source of knowledge can be confronted with the following skeptical objection: on a standard account of the conditions for both the possession and transmission of knowledge, fiction cannot be considered a source of knowledge, for we are not justified in believing any claims from fiction. Our paper argues that the skeptic is wrong. We will start by introducing the notion of self-knowledge, the knowledge a person has of their own conscious attitudes, and distinguish it from knowledge of the self. Both kinds of knowledge concern a person’s beliefs about herself, but they differ in their precise scope and justificatory conditions. We will then argue that the self-knowledge one easily gains by reading fiction is an important route to knowledge of the self, which in turn is hard to obtain, and that a case can be made for literary fiction being an especially valuable source of knowledge of the self

Empirical Correlates of Narrative Closure

This paper presents an experimental investigation of the narratological concept of narrative closure. While narrative closure is a well-studied phenomenon in contemporary narratology, it still lacks a serious empirical foundation. In order to fill that lacuna, we performed a controlled rating experiment aimed at validating some of the properties of narrative closure proposed in the narratological literature. Our results suggest that narrative closure is closely related to two connected properties: to the completeness of the text and to questions left open by the text

Truth Matters, Aesthetically

This paper defends a version of aesthetic cognitivism: the truth of statements expressed, implied, or alluded to by a work of fiction matters aesthetically, and bears upon the work’s aesthetic value. Our aim is to explore a route from truth to aesthetic value that claims, roughly, that, if our engagement with a work of fiction is based on truth, it is more vivid than otherwise, and thereby contributes to the aesthetic value of the work. Whether truth increases the vividness of our engagement with fiction is an empirical question. On the assumption that it does, we spell out some consequences for the aesthetic value, and in particular for the literary value of a work, as well as for critical practice.11412