Stacie Friend

Analytic aesthetics has had little to say about academic schools of criticism, such as Freudian, Marxist, feminist, or postcolonial perspectives. Historicists typically view their interpretations as anachronistic; non-historicists assess all interpretations according to formalist criteria. Insofar as these strategies treat these interpretations as on a par, however, they are inadequate. For the theories that ground the interpretations differ in the claims they make about the world. I argue that the interpretations of different critical schools can be evaluated according to the truth or epistemic merit of these claims.

Kendall Walton’s “Categories of Art” (1970) is one of the most important and influential papers in twentieth-century aesthetics. It is almost universally taken to refute traditional aesthetic formalism/empiricism, according to which all that matters aesthetically is what is manifest to perception. Most commentators assume that the argument of “Categories” applies to works of literature. Walton himself notes a word of caution: “The aesthetic properties of works of literature are not happily called ‘perceptual’ … (The notion of perceiving a work in a category … is not straightforwardly applicable to literary works)” (335 n.5). However, he goes on to say that although he focuses “on visual and musical works … the central points I make concerning them hold, with suitable modifications, for novels, plays, and poems as well” (335 n.5). Here I consider what “suitable modifications” are required to extend the account to literature.

The currently standard approach to fiction is to define it in terms of imagination. I have argued elsewhere that no conception of imagining is sufficient to distinguish a response appropriate to fiction as opposed to non-fiction. In her contribution Kathleen Stock seeks to refute this objection by providing a more sophisticated account of the kind of propositional imagining prescribed by so-called ‘fictive utterances’. I argue that although Stock's proposal improves on other theories, it too fails to provide an adequate criterion of fictionality. I conclude by sketching an alternative account according to which fiction is a genre.

I argue that judgments of what is ‘true in a fiction’ presuppose the Reality Assumption: the assumption that everything that is true is fictionally the case, unless excluded by the work. By contrast with the more familiar Reality Principle, the Reality Assumption is not a rule for inferring implied content from what is explicit. Instead, it provides an array of real-world truths that can be used in such inferences. I claim that the Reality Assumption is essential to our ability to understand stories, drawing on a range of empirical evidence that demonstrates our reliance on it in narrative comprehension. However, the Reality Assumption has several unintuitive consequences, not least that what is fictionally the case includes countless facts that neither authors nor readers could ever consider. I argue that such consequences provide no reason to reject the Reality Assumption. I conclude that we should take fictions, like non-fictions, to be about the real world.

In this paper, I review developments in discussions of fiction and emotion over the last decade concerning both the descriptive question of how to classify fiction-directed emotions and the normative question of how to evaluate those emotions. Although many advances have been made on these topics, a mistaken assumption is still common: that we must hold either that fiction-directed emotions are (empirically or normatively) the same as other emotions, or that they are different. I argue that we should reject this dichotomy.

A familiar question in the literature on emotional responses to fiction, originally put forward by Colin Radford, is how such responses can be rational. How can we make sense of pitying Anna Karenina when we know there is no such person? In this paper I argue that contrary to the usual interpretation, the question of rationality has nothing to do with the Paradox of Fiction. Instead, the real problem is why there is a divergence in our normative assessments of emotions in different contexts. I argue that explaining this divergence requires a more nuanced account of the rationality of emotion than has previously been proposed. One advantage of my proposal over alternatives is that it helps to explain one way we can learn emotionally from fiction and imagination.

Proper names in fiction and in discourse about fiction generate certain puzzles. How can claims like "Raskolnikov is Russian" be true if there is no Raskolnikov? If fiction involves make-believe rather than truth, why say that Nineteen Eighty-Four is about the real London? In my dissertation I argue that the key to resolving such puzzles is by considering the ways in which interpretations of works of fiction generate normative constraints on our imaginings. And I argue that traditional solutions fail both because they operate with inadequate theories of proper names, and because they do not recognize the centrality of interpretation and imagination to fiction-involving discourse. ;After laying out desiderata for my project in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 I elaborate an account of the contents communicated by utterances that explains how even nonreferring names can be used to "talk about the same thing." In Chapter 3 I argue that to classify a narrative as fiction is to link it to a certain historical practice, one whose standards of interpretation and assessment evolve over time. Because this theory does not define fiction in terms of general semantic properties, it allows us to recognize the variety of roles both referring and nonreferring names can play in different works. Chapter 4 surveys some of these roles, developing an account of our judgments of truth and fictional correctness for particular works. ;In the last two chapters I turn to an analysis of proper names in utterances about fiction. In Chapter 5 I argue that once we recognize the relativity to interpretation of the contents communicated by these utterances, we should maintain that referring names in discourse about fiction designate their ordinary referents in their ordinary way. In Chapter 6 I develop a conception of pretend reference that explains how utterances containing empty names can be true, without assuming that these names have special meanings or that they refer to nonexistent or abstract objects. The result is a unified, systematic theory of proper names across a wide range fiction-involving discourse that does justice to our imaginative engagement with fiction