The Distinction of Fiction

Dados Bibliográficos

ID23398140
AutoresDorrit Cohn (autor correspondente)
Ano2000
Páginas197
Data de publicação2000-01-01
Open AccessNão
TipoBOOK
PeriódicoThe distinction of fiction (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditoraJohns Hopkins University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.56021/9780801859427
OpenAlexW2044167911
Open LibraryOL347606M
ISBN9780801859427
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas99

Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 197 pp. $42.00 hardcover. Reading Dorrit Cohn's The Distinction of Fiction made me feel proud of myself. Along the way I kept thinking, is the best book I've read this year, only to learn, some weeks later, that The Distinction of Fiction had won the MLA's Aldo Scaglioni Prize for the best book of the year in the field of Comparative Literature. Anyone now reading Cohn's fascinating, magisterial essay on the specificity of fictional narration (artifiction) can recover this thrill: pride in oneself and pride in one's community. Community is a key term: this book is the outcome of Cohn's reflection on the nature and workings of fictional discourse within the systematic knowledge elaborated by a community of narratologists, Cohn prima inter pares. Her conclusions arise from a fine assaying of the scholarship that has accumulated around such fundamental questions as: how does the (fictional) substance of the literary work come to light? With what authority? With what distinction? The matter in parenthesis is crucial because what is always at stake in Cohn's reflections is the differentiation-and, hence, the salvaging - of fictional works from those that, for Cohn, are decidedly nonfictional; works, like history and biography, that claim to refer to a pre-given world and by such conventions of claiming, do so. Not all narrative is fiction; everything is not (the same kind of) text. On this path of thinking one continually has glimpses of the depth and importance of the issues involved-glimpsed, like a wide exhilarating landscape through a precisely framed window: fundamental issues of truth, reference, authority. From the start The Distinction of Fiction argues for the existence of inalienable markers of fictional narrative and maintains continuity by returning to them. The existence of such flies in the face of claims held by speech-act theorists such as John Searle, who argues: There is textual property, syntactic or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of (20). Yet, for Cohn, various markers of fiction make themselves felt. All fiction is constituted by a preterite or by an absolute present that departs from ordinary conceptions of past or present. Here the past no longer needs to refer to the speaker's own past; for example, can refer to the 'now' of an individual whose plane 'left tomorrow' (25). As in all narrative, however, the narrated event precedes the event of narration. The language of fiction cannot say what is the plot-event in the instant of its emergence; such language may be its own event but cannot coincide with the event of what is narrated-and this is true too, as Cohn shows in a tour de force, even in the first-person present-- tense artifiction of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The difference between the verb tense of the fiction and its peculiar disjunctive temporality is one of its eternal distinctions. Cohn's distinctions have immediate practical force. For example: from the foregoing, it would appear that Alexander Nehamas's provocative thesis in Nietzsche: Life as Literature that Nietzsche becomes in his work the literary character that he is-Nietzsche as narrator fusing with Nietzsche as character-must collide with the untenable supposition that the substance of the narrated could coincide with that of the narrating instance. The second feature marking the difference between fiction and factual writing is that peculiar device of extrospection which Cohn, in a previous work of narratology, has called transparent minds (Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978]). This is the privilege of the narrator only of fiction, who may report with authority the contents of consciousness of some person other than the narrator. The mind of the other is presented as if it were transparent. ...

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