Fictional Worlds

by Thomas G. Pavel

Creators of fiction demand that we venture into alien spaces, into the worlds of Antigone, Don Quixote, Faust, Sherlock Holmes. Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant. Why, then, does fiction continue to pull us in and, more interesting perhaps, how? In this beautiful book Pavel provides a poetics of the imaginary worlds of fiction, their properties and their reason for being. Thomas Pavelis a noted literary theorist and a novelist as well. His genial, graceful book has a polemical he notes that structuralism started as a project to infuse new life into literary studies through the devices of linguistics. That project undercut referential issues, however, and is now obsolete. Pavelargues that what matters about fiction is its relation to the human capacity of invention and the complex requirements of imagination. He moves decisively beyond the constraints of formalism and textualism toward a diverse theory of fiction that is sensitive to both literary and philosophical concerns. Along the way he takes its through special landscapes that reveal the inextricability of art, religion, and myth. This is a venturesome book of the first order.

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Theory, Writing

190 pages, Hardcover

First published September 3, 1986

Reviews

[Anthony Lacroix]

Veux, veux pas, j’ai enfin du temps pour avancer ma thèse.

[Hélène Lamboley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Une perspective novatrice qui relie de manière équilibrée les deux pôles de la forme et du sens en littérature sur un sujet qui me passionne, celui de l’intérêt des fictions, de leur cohérence et de leur rapport au réel.

La lecture demande de la concentration car le livre est riche en références précises et techniques à des théoriciens du langage, de la littérature et de la fiction (entre philosophie et modèles mathématiques). Pavel est un théoricien et s’adresse à des lecteurs avertis.
Ceci dit, lectrice avertie, je trouve qu’il passe souvent un peu vite d’une théorie et d’un auteur à l’autre, piochant de ci de là des idées apportant de l’eau à son moulin sans forcément toujours assez approfondir à mon goût les explications. On dirait (et c’est peut-être le cas) une forme de compte-rendu de travaux spécialisés dont le livre offrirait une synthèse d’ensemble.

[VII · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is not terrible but this too is more of a textbook than a book that argues for a thesis, and the approach is way too analytical. He distinguishes between three independent questions about fictional worlds: their metaphysical status when it comes to truth, whether there is a difference between the "real" and the "fictional" worlds and whether fiction is important (institutional), and then goes on in our very familiar analytic fashion. Sometimes (but rarely) he gives examples and talks about actual literature and we get a glimpse of how the book could have been good, but for the most part it deals with things like reference or with whether the world of a book is incomplete or not, or whether books that have more pages, also contain a larger fictional world. These are just silly for me.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A convincing and elegant argument for a new "ontological framework" for analyzing fiction, wherein the content of a novel may be seen as reflecting a near or distant "possible world", rather than the mere untruth it represents historically in the philosophy of linguistics.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Acquired Jul 5, 2003
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR

[Lucía ✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for uni. This was so confusing from beginning to end.