Practice question · Multiple choice
Why does the principle of minimal departure explain why fantasy needs little exposition?
Hints
- Ask what the reader assumes about gravity in a story that never mentions it.
- The default is the actual world, and only stated changes overwrite it.
Show the answer
D. Because readers import everything the text does not contradict, so only departures need stating
Why
Because the actual world is the default. Say a dragon lands in a field and the reader supplies the field, the grass, the weather, gravity, hunger and mortality without being told. The text spends its words only on the departures, and a world that departs on too many axes at once leaves the reader nothing to carry over.
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.
- 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.