Fictional Discourse A Radical Fictionalist Semantics

by Predelli, Stefano

• ISBN13: 9780198854128
• ISBN10: 0198854129
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2020-03-04
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics combines the insight of linguistic and philosophical semantics with the study of fictional language. Its central idea is familiar to anyone exposed to the ways of narrative fiction, namely the notion of a fictional teller. Starting with premises having to do with fictional names such as 'Holmes' or 'Emma', Stefano Predelli develops Radical Fictionalism, a theory that is subsequently applied to central themes in the analysis of fiction. Among other things, he discusses the distinction between storyworlds and narrative peripheries, the relationships between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, narrative time, unreliability, and closure. The final chapters extend Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse, as Predelli introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.

Author Biography

Stefano Predelli, University of Nottingham

Stefano Predelli completed his doctoral studies at UCLA in 1991, with a dissertation on indexicals supervised by David Kaplan. He then moved to Norway, where he taught for a few years at the University of Oslo. He is currently a professor at the University of Nottingham. His previous publications include Contexts: Meaning, Truth, and the Use of Language (Oxford 2005), Meaning without Truth (Oxford 2013), and Proper Names (Oxford 2017).

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Preliminaries
2. The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers
3. Emma: The Narrative Periphery
4. Cat's Cradle: Peripheral Importations
5. An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge: From Our Point of View
6. Reflux and Bone Structure: Periphery and Interpretation
7. The Turn of the Screw: Critical Discourse
8. Tess of the D'Urbervilles: Literary Characters
9. Conclusion