Practice question · True or false
Most of the sentences in a realist novel are, taken individually, true statements about the world.
Hints
- Think about descriptions of a city, of grief, of how a trade works.
- Fictionality is about the author's commitment, not about falsity.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and it is why defining fiction by falsity fails. A novel can be dense with accurate observation and remains fiction because the author's commitment to its assertions is suspended, not because the assertions are false.
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?
- 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…