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 engages the long and complicated arguments that have taken up these issues, providing a clear and comprehensive survey of the disputes and the major disputants. She 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. "The 'distinction' that my title attributes to fiction is to be understood in two senses of the word: uniqueness and differentiation. This study aims to show that fictional narrative is unique in its potential for crafting a self-enclosed universe ruled by formal patterns that are ruled out in all other orders of discourse."--from the Preface "The Distinction of Fiction is clearly organized, well argued, and well written. While addressing specialists in narratology, it remains accessible to a much wider audience. Dorrit Cohn provides us with a comprehensive survey of the controversy about the relation between factual and fictional narration, and shows how it might be resolved.
In her discussion of narratives that straddle the border between reference and imagination, Cohn shows that they are ambiguous only if we assume that fact can be distinguished from fiction. Undecidability, she argues, rather than dissolving our frameworks of generic distinctions, presupposes their existence. As a reference-point (and perhaps a lightning-rod) for future discussion of these issues, the book will be required reading for narratologists, and will attract the attention of all those who teach fiction."--Wallace Martin, University of Toledo, author of Recent Theories of Narrative and editor of The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America "The Distinction of Fiction is clearly organized, well argued, and well written. While addressing specialists in narratology, it remains accessible to a much wider audience. Dorrit Cohn provides us with a comprehensive survey of the controversy about the relation between factual and fictional narration, and shows how it might be resolved. In her discussion of narratives that straddle the border between reference and imagination, Cohn shows that they are ambiguous only if we assume that fact can be distinguished from fiction.
Undecidability, she argues, rather than dissolving our frameworks of generic distinctions, presupposes their existence. As a reference-point (and perhaps a lightning-rod) for future discussion of these issues, the book will be required reading for narratologists, and will attract the attention of all those who teach fiction."--Wallace Martin, University of Toledo, author of Recent Theories of Narrative and editor of The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America. [email WMARTIN@uoft02.utoledo.edu, OK 7/3/98 mdt] (Approved)
