Abstract
In Western scholarship, fictionality is often discussed as an entity without culture. By “fictionality,” I am referring to a set of qualities that render an entity or discourse fictional; the nature of such qualities is highly controversial and the subject of continuous studies, whose underlying assumption is that such qualities indeed exist and can be delineated. Albeit scholars attach cultures to conceptual categories like “fiction” or “theories of fiction” (e.g. French fiction, Japanese theories of fiction), fictionality itself is not described as culture-specific, though not explicitly proclaimed to be uniform across cultures either. Focusing on the universal rather than the culture-specific is not inherently wrong. As human perspectives are limited, we often have to choose between the benefits and shortcomings of micro- and macro-level analysis. My goal is not merely to criticize theories of fictionality for being insensitive to cultural specificity. Rather, it is to propose a culturally sensitive approach to solve a critical, almost crippling, theoretical bottleneck in the study of fictionality where theories of fictionality are formulated to be culture-less, but the definition of fictionality requires culture-specific communicative contexts. In this paper, I will demonstrate how redefining fiction and fictionality based on a culture-sensitive theoretical framework can free scholarship on premodern Chinese fiction from the teleological tendency of imposing expectations set by the modern Western novel onto the study of premodern and non-Western literature.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Narrative Theory, Theory of Fiction
