Table Of ContentHow to Make Believe
Narratologia
Contributions to Narrative Theory
Edited by
Fotis Jannidis, Matías Martínez, John Pier,
Wolf Schmid (executive editor)
Editorial Board
Catherine Emmott, Monika Fludernik, José Ángel García Landa, Inke Gunia,
Peter Hühn, Manfred Jahn, Markus Kuhn, Uri Margolin, Jan Christoph Meister,
Ansgar Nünning, Marie-Laure Ryan, Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Michael Scheffel,
Sabine Schlickers, Jörg Schönert
Volume 49
How to
Make Believe
The Fictional Truths of the Representational Arts
Edited by
J. Alexander Bareis and Lene Nordrum
ISBN 978-3-11-044153-6
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-044387-5
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-043572-6
ISSN 1612-8427
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A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
♾ Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
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Table of Contents
J. Alexander Bareis and Lene Nordrum
Introduction | 1
Section 1 – Theory
Stein Haugom Olsen
The Concept of Literary Realism | 15
Peter Lamarque
Thought, Make-Believe and the Opacity of Narrative | 41
James R. Hamilton
Narrative per se and Narratibility | 61
Section 2 – Literature and Film
Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe
Distance in Fiction | 77
Sarah E. Worth
Narration, Representation, Memoir, Truth, and Lies
How We Diminish the Art of Narrative with Simple Truths | 95
Remigius Bunia
Truth in Fiction | 113
Ira Newman
Destabilizing Reality
Postmodern Narrative and the Logic of Make-Believe | 139
Jukka Mikkonen
The Place for External Considerations in Reading Literary Fiction | 155
VI | Table of Contents
J. Alexander Bareis
Fictional Truth, Principles of Generation and Interpretation
Or: Why it is Ficionally True that Tony Soprano was Shot Dead | 165
Mario Slugan
Deixis in Literary and Film Fiction
Intra-ontological Reference and the Case of Controlling
Fictional Narrators | 185
Liviu Lutas
Metalepsis and Participation in Games of Make-Believe | 203
Sonja Klimek
‘I grieve’ as Make-Believe
Generating Fictional Truth in Eighteenth-Century Lamentation Poetry
(Günther, Haller, Young and Novalis) | 223
Section 3 – Theatre and Music
Frank Zipfel
Fictionality and Make-Believe in Drama, Theatre and Opera | 245
Matthew DeCoursey
Making Meaning in the Theatre: Double Noesis | 269
Eran and Inbal Guter
Impurely Musical Make-Believe | 283
Section 4 – Games
E. M. Dadlez
Make-Believe Wickedness vs. Wicked Making-Believe
RPGs, Imagination and Moral Complicity | 309
Jason D’Cruz
Agency and Volition in Make-Believe Worlds | 323
Table of Contents | VII
Chris Bateman
Prop Perspective and the Aesthetics of Play | 335
Index | 353
Contact Addresses | 361
J. Alexander Bareis and Lene Nordrum
Introduction
In 1990, two fundamental books on the notion of make-believe were published:
Kendall Walton’s Mimesis and Make-Believe and Gregory Currie’s The Nature of
Fiction. Both books explain fictionality in analogy to children’s games of make-
believe, and in both books, the notion of imagination is central. Both works
have greatly influenced research in the field of aesthetics in analytical philoso-
phy, but perhaps more importantly, they have contributed to widening the no-
tion of make-believe and its explanatory power beyond the domain of philoso-
phy with the result that the make-believe explanation of fiction has become
‘Theory’. In the words of Jonathan Culler (2011, 3): “Works regarded as theory
have effects beyond their original field.” Once the notion of make-believe start-
ed to spread into such areas as literary criticism and film studies, one could
argue that it became ‘Theory’ with a capital ‘T’. Today, some twenty years later,
make-believe theory is used in a wide array of different academic disciplines,
and researchers from subjects as different as psychology and mathematics make
use of the theoretical concept. The strongest impact in the last two decades,
however, has been within the representational arts and its core fields of litera-
ture, film and visual arts where make-believe theory is on firm ground with
numerous refinements and critical discussions to build on. Other areas are still
in need of further investigation.
The core idea behind make-believe theory is its analogy between the recep-
tion of works of art and the basic function of children’s game of make-believe.
Two concepts serve key roles in this respect – imagination and fiction. Imagina-
tion is central to the understanding of how activities are connected to the ap-
preciation of art, and fiction is central to the way scholars have divided the turf
in various disciplines over a long time. To be more specific, once a game of
make-believe is in process, participants will generate fictional truths according
to the unwritten, but mutually accepted rules of the game. According to Walton,
this game of make-believe works approximately the same way for all types of
representational arts, e. g. novels, films, poems, pictures, plays, statues, dance
and even music. Thus, works of representational art have in common that they
are used as props in games of make-believe with the result that the ‘mechanics
of generation’ of fictional truths are at work.
Both Walton and Currie have given thorough accounts of how these me-
chanics of generation can be described, with rich examples from a variety of
different fields within the representational arts, above all from literature and
film. They have also emphasized that all the different categories of representa-
