Truth, Fiction, and Literature A Philosophical Perspective [Paperback]

This book 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 skeptical views, prevalent in modern thought, according to which the world Ptself is a kind of fiction, and truth no more than a social construct. They identify different conceptions of fiction in science, logic, epistemology, and make-believe, and thereby challenge the idea that discourseper seis 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 rigor 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.

1. Setting the Scene
2. The Practice of Storytelling
3. Truth-Value and Pretence
4. Content and Characters
5. Reference and `About'
6. Aspects, Points of View, Objectivity
7. Metaphysics and Fictions
8. Truth-Making and World-Making
9. Narrative and Imagination
10. Literary Practice
11. Literature and Fiction
12. The Theory of Novelistic Truth
13. The Propositional Theory of Literary Truth
14. Metaphorical Truth
15. Literature as Philosophy
16. The Mimetic Aspect of Literature
17. Fiction, Literature, and Value
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