What is “fiction”
LIT 2010
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What is “fiction” LIT 2010 |
Childers and Hentzi offer a helpful starting point to the study of “fiction”:
Although most commonly used to describe a general category of literary texts within which one may distinguish genres such as the novel and the short story, fiction is actually a complex and somewhat ambiguous term that begs a number of questions about how we distinguish between truth and falsity, as well as how we order our world. (110)While characters and situations portrayed in stories may not have a basis in reality (and are, in this sense, false), they, nevertheless, contain truths to what it means to be human and live as a human. Fiction provides us with a particular instance from which we may draw more general conclusions about our lives and the lives of those around us: “when a narrator comments in a general way about thew death of a character, drawing conclusions about the universality of martality, that statement may be integral to the fiction but also possess truth value for the reader” (Childers and Hentzi 110). So generally, when we study fiction, we are interested in extrapolating from the author’s unique, individual perspective general truths about humanity and our place within it’s social order. Yet, many of the views that we will read this semester seem to contradict others that we will also encounter. This fact leads me to posit the course question: what, then, is the current situation of humanity in the light of the various perspectives we study this semester? What are the implications of being human at the end of the 20th century? |
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LIT 2010
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