Fabulation
Fabulation in literature refers to the creation of imaginative or fantastical stories that may not be entirely realistic. It often involves elements of fantasy, myth, or folklore, and can be used to explore complex themes and ideas. Fabulation allows writers to break free from conventional storytelling and create unique, inventive narratives.
4 Key excerpts on "Fabulation"
eBook - ePubFantasy and Mimesis (Routledge Revivals)
Responses to Reality in Western Literature
- Kathryn Hume(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...If we look at western literature historically, we find all sorts of departures from consensus reality throughout its span, in the works of such major authors as Homer and Virgil; Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pynchon; Crétien de Troyes and Rabelais; Gottfried of Strassburg, Thomas Mann, and Kafka; Dante and Calvino. There are genres and works that eschew fantasy throughout this span, and in the nineteenth century fantasy was consciously pushed to the periphery by the upholders of the realistic novel, but fantasy has generally been a well-established part of mainstream narrative, and is now well re-established in contemporary fiction. To do justice to this all-but-universal phenomenon, we must abandon the assumption that mimesis, the vraisemblance to the world we know, is the only real part of literature; give up the notion that fantasy is peripheral and readily separable. We must start instead from the assumption that literature is the product of both mimesis and fantasy, and talk about mimetic and fantastic elements in any one work. Only then can we hope to approach literature without the distortion of perspective bequeathed to us by Plato and Aristotle. My working definition is therefore of the simplest sort, and much like W.R. Irwin’s. Fantasy is any departure from consensus reality, an impulse native to literature and manifested in innumerable variations, from monster to metaphor. It includes transgressions of what one generally takes to be physical facts such as human immortality, travel faster than light, telekinesis, and the like. Telepathy, although it may show up as a statistical effect in Rhine Institute studies of card-calling, does not work on the communication-as-if-by-telephone principle that some fiction displays, so that too is fantasy...
eBook - ePub- Monika Fludernik(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The point is to come to terms with and interpret the experience. Fludernik does not recognize the existence of two types of narrative, fictional and non-fictional. Narrative is fictional per se, not because it is ‘made up’ or deals with fantastic occurrences, but because it is based on the representation of psychological states and mental perceptions. The fictive Alternative studies on fictionality are concerned with the notion of the fictive. Starting out from this concept, fictionality is seen as being fundamental to human action and behaviour. In play, we make up scenarios and characters, conjuring up virtual play-worlds from childhood on, a process strongly resembling storytelling (Currie 1990, Lamarque/Olsen 1994). The fictive is even more familiar from mathematics and in virtual scenarios: ‘imaginary’ numbers, ‘assuming that, then …’. Although such virtual scenarios are central to play, where the imagination is allowed to roam free, until now there has been little research into their significance for literary narrative. Signalling fictionality Traditional studies of fictionality and non-fictionality in narrative discourse have tended to start out by postulating various narrative categories which, it is claimed, only exist in novels and not in real-life stories. The widely held view that metaphors can only exist, or at least are mainly found, in poetry has been discredited, for we find metaphors in advertisements and even in scientific papers. Similarly, the linguistic and narrative elements that are supposed to signal fictionality have also been recognized, in the meantime, as having a much wider distribution. There are no aspects of narrative which could be described as typically literary (Löschnigg 1999). For example, free indirect discourse occurs outside the novel, in conversational narrative and even in newspaper articles...
eBook - ePubNarrative Form
Revised and Expanded Second Edition
- Suzanne Keen(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...For Pavel, incompleteness is a key feature of fictional worlds, and coherence, though sometimes a quality of fictional worlds, need not be present. Pavel makes the point that human beings have long lived in ‘notoriously incongruous universes’ without needing unity and cohesiveness (Fictional Worlds, 50). Fictional worlds, according to Pavel, are as various as fictional practices, and they include ‘salient’ worlds with no corresponding references to verifiable existents in the actual world. Fictionality thus encompasses fictional worlds that pretend to be representations of the real world and fictional worlds that make highly improbable, even impossible, truth claims. Some definitions of narrative fiction hinge on the presence of truth claims, though it is usually recognized that these truth claims are imbued with a high degree of indeterminacy, as Sidney noted when he said that the poet is not a liar, because he affirms nothing about the real (brazen) world. Michael Riffaterre writes in Fictional Truth that, ‘Fiction is a genre whereas lies are not’ and ‘A novel always contains signs whose function is to remind readers that the tale they are being told is imaginary’ (Fictional Truth, 1). (The objection that some early fictions and a minority of contemporary narrative fictions present themselves in the guise of the nonfiction genres I take up in Chapter 10.) The invitation to understand a narrative’s claims as imaginary initiates world-making: as Wolfgang Iser suggests, it invites the creation of an ‘As If’ world. That world may resemble the actual world or not. Realistic fiction asserts its reflection of the actual world in a way that may render its fictionality transparent, but realistic narratives rely on the reader’s capacity to generate a sense of wholeness and actuality out of a finite set of references, the reader’s world-making. Realistic fictions are as separate from the everyday world of a reader as the most flagrant make-believe...
eBook - ePubNarrative Impact
Social and Cognitive Foundations
- Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, Timothy C. Brock, Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, Timothy C. Brock(Authors)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Whatever the aims of a specific work of fiction, we are left with a mode of discourse that allows authors to liberally intermix plausible statements and portraits that they believe to be true of the world with those that are knowingly false. Without the benefit of the explicit local marking of referential intent that characterizes everyday speech (e.g., Sanders & Redeker, 1996), readers are often left guessing as to whether or not real-world truth claims are being made. Context Management in Multimodal Worlds A signature characteristic of fictional discourse is that it allows authors, through their literary personas, to utter knowingly untrue assertions without these statements being deemed to be lies. This is the poetic license that Oscar Wilde celebrated, in The Decay of Lying (1889/1920), as the source of art’s “distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power” (p. 13). Art, he argued via the personas of Cyril and Vivian, “is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment” (p.21). An adamant critic of realism, Wilde represents an ideal in which life mimics art, not the reverse: “A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher” (p. 32). Of course, popular literature has seen fit to embrace both realism and aestheticism, to treat life both as an object to be reflected and as the raw material from which to shape new visions, experiences, and forms. Stories both mirror and invent, and to the extent that their inventions are construed as reflections of the world, the license that fiction is granted can lead to misconceptions about the way things work, what and how things happened, and who individuals and communities are. The tension between the poles of reflection and invention is present in all coherent stories at different levels of abstraction...
