If you want to know more: Wolfgang Iser, Paul

Ricoeur (& Lubomir Doleel)

There are two philosophers who have advanced the thesis that fiction
creates a world of its own: Paul Ricoeur and Wolfgang Iser. Their idea is
that the literary text is neither opposed to reality nor autotelic, but
pretends, !a"es believe. This act of !a"ebelief is defined by two
!o!ents:
#. It divests the references to extratextual reality fro! its real co!ponent
by turning the! into signs, and on the other hand it confers reality on
the i!aginary ele!ents. This way,
the ele!ents of reality, which enter the text, are not any
longer tied to the se!antic or syste!atic structuration of the
syste! $...% fro! which they were ta"en &Iser #''(: )*, !y
translation+.
). ,t the sa!e ti!e, the act of pretending does not consign the text to
!eaninglessness in the real world- instead, it builds alternative worlds
which allow us to tal" of those things which are i!possible to discuss in
the real world. Ricoeur, who ac"nowledges his debt to Iser, can thus
say that
Poetic texts, too, spea" of the world, even though they !ay
not do so in a descriptive fashion. .etaphorical reference
$Iser/s pretending% consists in the fact that the efface!ent
of descriptive reference 0 and efface!ent that, as a first
approxi!ation, !a"es language refer to itself 0 is revealed to
be, in a second approxi!ation, the negative condition for
freeing a !ore radical power of reference to those aspects of
our being1in1the1world that cannot be tal"ed about directly.
&#'2*: 23+
!"#D$LI#: a single tool to analyse all te%ts
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Ricoeur and Iser/s understanding of fiction as pretending, as !etaphorical
reference, as an exploitation of the cognitive function of language, provides
an i!!ense develop!ent over previous !odels which tried to !a"e sense
of the difference between fiction and reality, in which the for!er always
proved the loser when co!pared to the latter.
Ricoeur4s and Iser4s ideas have been ta"en up by !ainstrea! literary
theory. Thus, in a solid, !odern and standard introduction to narrative
theory li"e 5luderni" )336, one of the cornerstones on which narative
theory rests is the very idea that fictional wor"s create fictional worlds
which are in !any ways si!ilar to our real world is. There is at present an
approach to fiction &standard $and disputed% in philosophy and logic+ called
7possible worlds7. 8ne of its !ost i!portant exponents, 9ubo!ir :ole;el,
has devised a possible world which in so!e ways rese!bles the one
proposed in <ustdo9it. =hortly, this website will include an entry indicating
differences and si!ilarities between :ole;el/s possible world and that of
<ustdo9it.
works cited
5luderni", .oni"a. Einfhrung in die Erzhltheorie. :W>: :ar!stadt, )336.
Iser, Wolfgang. Das Fiktive und das Imaginre. Perspektiven literarischer
Hermeneutik. 5ran"furt?..: =uhr"a!p, #''(.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and arrative. @ol. #. Ahicago: B of Ahicago P, #'2*.
daniel.candelCuah.es D)332 :aniel Aandel Eor!ann
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