Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective

by Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen

Overview

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 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 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198236818
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/15/1997
Series:	Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	494
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 5.50(h) x 1.11(d)

Table of Contents

1. Setting the Scene2. The Practice of Storytelling3. Truth-Value and Pretence4. Content and Characters5. Reference and ‘About'6. Aspects, Points of View, Objectivity7. Metaphysics and Fictions8. Truth-Making and World-Making9. Narrative and Imagination10. Literary Practice11. Literature and Fiction12. The Theory of Novelistic Truth13. The Propositional Theory of Literary Truth14. Metaphorical Truth15. Literature as Philosophy16. The Mimetic Aspect of Literature17. Fiction, Literature, and ValueBibliography, Index

Editorial Reviews

"[Lamarque and Olsen's] "no truth" theory is a welcome corrective to strongly cognitivist views and deserves to become an important source in the debate about the nature and value of literature."—The Philosophical Review

From the Publisher