Practice question · Match the pairs
Match each term from the theory of fiction to what it names.
- Peritext
- Epitext
- Pretended assertion
- Minimal departure
- Interviews, letters and reviews outside the volume
- The framing matter inside the volume
- The rule that unstated facts match the actual world
- A claim made with the commitment suspended
Hints
- Two of the terms are about the frame around the text, two about what happens inside it.
- The rule about unstated facts is Ryan’s.
Show the answer
- Peritext → The framing matter inside the volume
- Epitext → Interviews, letters and reviews outside the volume
- Pretended assertion → A claim made with the commitment suspended
- Minimal departure → The rule that unstated facts match the actual world
Why
The four terms cover the two halves of the transaction: the frame that tells you a text is fiction, and the conventions that make the fictional world usable once you have accepted it. Neither half is visible in the sentences themselves, which is Searle’s point.
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
- 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…
- 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.