Practice question · Put in order
Arrange the stages of the fictional contract as the reader enters it.
- Internal inconsistencies now count as errors
- The paratext signals that the text is fiction
- The reader imports everything not contradicted
- The text specifies its departures from the actual world
- The reader grants the suspension of disbelief
Hints
- The frame is set before the first sentence is read.
- Once the world is built, contradictions inside it become breaches.
Show the answer
- The paratext signals that the text is fiction
- The reader grants the suspension of disbelief
- The text specifies its departures from the actual world
- The reader imports everything not contradicted
- Internal inconsistencies now count as errors
Why
The last step is the interesting one. Granting the contract does not suspend judgement, it relocates it. Objecting that dragons do not exist is a misunderstanding of the frame; objecting that the dragon changed its number of heads is a legitimate complaint about the work.
Practise Fictionality
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More questions on Fictionality
- Match each term from the theory of fiction to what it names.
- On Searle's account, what separates fiction from lying is the absence of an intention to deceive.
- Why does the principle of minimal departure explain why fantasy needs little exposition?
- Coleridge argues that readers engage in a 'willing suspension of disbelief for the moment'. What follows from…
- Genette divides the paratext into the peritext, which surrounds the text within the volume, and the epitext,…
- Of the background facts in a fictional world — gravity, mortality, weather, hunger — roughly what percentage…
- Most of the sentences in a realist novel are, taken individually, true statements about the world.