Practice question · Multiple choice
Coleridge argues that readers engage in a 'willing suspension of disbelief for the moment'. What follows from the bounded, contractual nature of this stance when evaluating inconsistencies in a fantasy text?
Hints
- What does the reader actively agree to overlook versus what constitutes an internal error?
- Why is an unannounced shift in a dragon's anatomy treated differently from the dragon existing at all?
Show the answer
D. Internal narrative contradictions break the agreed convention
Why
The contract excuses departures from empirical reality (like dragons existing) but binds the narrative to internal consistency. Conflating world-building premises with narrative coherence confuses generic suspension with structural contradiction.
Practise Fictionality
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
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?
- Arrange the stages of the fictional contract as the reader enters it.
- 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.