🚀 go-pugleaf

                The Graduate Group in Cognitive Science
            of the SUNY Buffalo Center for Cognitive Science

                              DORRIT COHN

                           Harvard University

                       SIGNPOSTS OF FICTIONALITY

"Our understanding of fiction needs the contrast with history as much as
our  understanding  of  history  needs the contrast with fiction" (Louis
Mink).  My presentation draws on an essay (to be  published  in  POETICS
TODAY)  that  looks  to  narrative poetics for guidelines to define this
contrast.  Though the boundary between fictional and non-fictional  nar-
rative  has  been  disregarded  by  narratologists themselves, it can be
shown that a number of their most important assumptions and  conclusions
apply  solely  within  the  fictional domain.  This holds true first and
foremost for the basic story/discourse dichotomy, a synchronic  bi-level
model  that excludes the referential claim of historiographic narrative.
The freedom of fiction from referential constraints in  turn  marks  its
discourse  itself  in distinctive ways, notably by the presence of modal
devices (such as free indirect style) that open it to  the  presentation
of  its  characters'  inner  lives.   A further demarcation concerns the
vocal instance (or origin) of fictional as compared to  a  non-fictional
narrative:   the  option  offered  the reader of fiction to separate its
narrator from its author, a move with far-reaching hermeneutic  implica-
tions.   Reference  is made to the works of theorists of both literature
and history who have variously identified and ignored these differential
features.

Cohn, Dorrit.  (1989).  "Fictional versus Historical Lives:  Borderlines
and Borderline Cases", Journal of Narrative Techniques.  19, 2-24.

Cohn, Dorrit. (1983).  Transparent Minds.  Princeton Univ. Press.

                        Date:   26 February 1990

                            Time:   4:00 pm

                            Room:   Park 280


For further information, contact Erwin Segal 716-636-3671 (segal@cs.buffalo.edu
  Dept. of Psychology.  An evening discussion will also be held, at a
                    time and place to be announced.