"The universe of possible worlds is constantly expanding and
diversifying thanks to the incessant world-constructing activity of
human minds and hands. Literary fiction is probably the most active
experimental laboratory of the world-constructing enterprise."--from the
author's Preface
The standard contrast between fiction and reality, notes Lubomír
Dolezel, obscures an array of problems that have beset philosophers and
literary critics for centuries. Commentators usually admit that fiction
conveys some kind of truth--the truth of the story of Faust, for
instance. They acknowledge that fiction usually bears some kind of
relation to reality--for example, the London of Dickens. But both the
status of the truth and the nature of the relationship have baffled,
frustrated, or repelled a long line of thinkers.
In Heterocosmica, Lubomír Dolezel offers nothing less than a complete
theory of literary fiction based on the idea of possible worlds.
Beginning with a discussion of the extant semantics and pragmatics of
fictionality--by Leibniz, Russell, Frege, Searle, Auerbach, and
others--he relates them to literature, literary theory, and narratology.
He also investigates theories of action, intention, and literary
communication to develop a system of concepts that allows him to offer
perceptive reinterpretations of a host of classical, modern, and
postmodern fictional narratives--from Defoe through Dickens, Dostoevsky,
Huysmans, Bely, and Kafka to Hemingway, Kundera, Rhys, Plenzdorf, and
Coetzee. By careful attention to philosophical inquiry into possible
worlds, especially Saul Kripke's and Jaakko Hintikka's, and through long
familiarity with literary theory, Dolezel brings us an unprecedented
examination of the notion of fictional worlds.
