Fictional Discourse

Abstract This book defends a Radical Fictionalist Semantics for fictional discourse. Focusing on proper names as prototypical devices of reference, it argues that fictional names are only fictionally proper names, and that, as a result, fictional sentences do not encode propositions. According to Radical Fictionalism, the contentful outcomes achieved by fiction are derived from the outcomes of so-called impartation, that is, from the effects achieved by the use of language. As a result, Radical Fictionalism pays special attention to fictional telling and to related themes in narrative fiction. In particular, the book proposes a Radical Fictionalist approach to the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic fiction, and to the divide between storyworlds and narrative peripheries. These ideas are then applied to the discussion of classic themes in the philosophy of fiction, including narrative time, literary translation, storyworld importation, fictional languages, inconsistent fictions, nested narratives, and narrative closure. Particular attention is also given to the commitments of Radical Fictionalism when it comes to discourse about fiction, as in prefixed sentences of the form ‘according to fiction F, … ’. In its final two chapters, the book extends Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse. In Chapter 7 it introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and in Chapter 8 it pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.