This book investigates the entire spectrum of techniques for portraying the mental lives of fictional characters in both the stream-of-consciousness novel and other fiction. Each chapter deals with one main technique, illustrated from a wide range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction by writers including Stendhal, Dostoevsky, James, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Proust, Woolf, and Sarraute.
This book investigates the entire spectrum of techniques for portraying the mental lives of fictional characters in both the stream-of-consciousnes...
Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies
The border between fact and fiction has been trespassed so often it seems to be a highway. Works of history that include fictional techniques are usually held in contempt, but works of fiction that include history are among the greatest of classics. Fiction claims to be able to convey its own unique kinds of truth. But unless a reader knows in advance whether a narrative is fictional or not, judgment can be frustrated and confused.
In The Distinction of...
Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies
In Why Fiction? one of the most important works of narrative theory to come out of France in recent years Jean-Marie Schaeffer understands fiction not as a literary genre but, in contrast to all other literary theorists, as a genre of life. The result is arguably the first systematic refutation of Plato s polemic against fiction and a persuasive argument for regarding fiction as having a cognitive function.For Schaeffer fiction includes not only narrative fiction but also children s games, videos, film, drama, certain kinds of painting, opera in short, all the intentional structures...
In Why Fiction? one of the most important works of narrative theory to come out of France in recent years Jean-Marie Schaeffer understands fict...
