"Winner of the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne
Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies"
The border between fact and fiction has been trespassed so often
it seems to be a highway. Works of history that include fictional
techniques are usually held in contempt, but works of fiction that
include history are among the greatest of classics. Fiction claims
to be able to convey its own unique kinds of truth. But unless a
reader knows in advance whether a narrative is fictional or not,
judgment can be frustrated and confused.
In "The Distinction of Fiction," Dorrit Cohn argues that fiction
does present specific clues to its fictionality, and its own
justifications. Indeed, except in cases of deliberate deception,
fiction achieves its purposes best by exercising generic
conventions that inform the reader that it is fiction. Cohn tests
her conclusions against major narrative works, including Proust's
"A la Recherche du temps perdu," Mann's "Death in Venice,"
Tolstoy's "War and Peace," and Freud's case studies. She contests
widespread poststructuralist views that "all" narratives are
fictional. On the contrary, she separates fiction and nonfiction as
necessarily distinct, even when bound together. An expansion of
Cohn's Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton and the product of
many years of labor and thought, "The Distinction of Fiction"
builds on narratological and phenomenological theories to show that
boundaries between fiction and history can be firmly and
systematically explored.
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