Renan Ferreira da Silva

Starting from Jacques Rancière's reflections on nineteenth-century literary literature, this paper aims to discuss a relation between the concepts of fiction and the "reality effect" investigated by the philosopher. In assuming the so called "realist" novel as a paradigm of his analysis, Rancière will question the notion of "reality effect" postulated by Roland Barthes, bringing the semiologist interpretation closer to that of literary critics which are committed to the position that underlies the logic of representation, found in aristotelian Poetics and Rhetoric. The poetics of representation comprises fiction as consisting of a plot based on verisimilitude, based on the logical chain of actions, defining the artistic work as a kind of hierarchical structure where the sections must be subordinate to the whole. For Rancière, the realist novel escapes the criteria imposed by the representative regime. More than a mere descriptive excess, the novel reverses its cosmology, inaugurating a new poetic regime marked by non-hierarchy and equality of genres and themes, in which the "reality effect" actually appears as an "effect of equality ", thus revealing a new" partition of the sensible".