The universality and the distinctiveness of fiction
The novel is fictitious – fiction, as we often refer to it. ‘fiction’ is a concept with which most people are familiar and which few find problematic. ‘telling stories’ is function that is so central to our culture that we pay it little analytical attention: we are accustomed to the need to distinguish between true reports and fictional stories ‘make-believe’ or ‘pretend’ from a very early age, and in this case ‘we’ does seem to refer to all human beings. Fiction is much wider than the novel or, indeed, than prose fiction: jokers, imitations and parodies, songs, and narrative poems can all be described as fiction and wider, non-literary usages include such things as legal fictions and (perhaps) folk tales and urban myths (fictions do not have to take the form of a story or a narrative). Now, although all of these share some common elements, we should beware of assuming that they are all the same: as I will argue later on, even fictional stories may vary so significantly that it makes sense to separate out one particular set of fictional stories and distinguish them by means of the term ‘novel’. Even so, I would want to argue that the specific tradition or set of traditions which we refer to as the novel is made possible by a far more widespread and fundamental reliance upon fiction in human society; coming to terms with the novel happens in easy stages in literate societies and appears to build upon universal habits of fantasy, play, role-playing and joking
The universality and the distinctiveness of fiction
The novel is fictitious – fiction, as we often refer to it. ‘fiction’ is a concept with which most people are familiar and which few find problematic. ‘telling stories’ is function that is so central to our culture that we pay it little analytical attention: we are accustomed to the need to distinguish between true reports and fictional stories ‘make-believe’ or ‘pretend’ from a very early age, and in this case ‘we’ does seem to refer to all human beings. Fiction is much wider than the novel or, indeed, than prose fiction: jokers, imitations and parodies, songs, and narrative poems can all be described as fiction and wider, non-literary usages include such things as legal fictions and (perhaps) folk tales and urban myths (fictions do not have to take the form of a story or a narrative). Now, although all of these share some common elements, we should beware of assuming that they are all the same: as I will argue later on, even fictional stories may vary so significantly that it makes sense to separate out one particular set of fictional stories and distinguish them by means of the term ‘novel’. Even so, I would want to argue that the specific tradition or set of traditions which we refer to as the novel is made possible by a far more widespread and fundamental reliance upon fiction in human society; coming to terms with the novel happens in easy stages in literate societies and appears to build upon universal habits of fantasy, play, role-playing and joking
การแปล กรุณารอสักครู่..