Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited ed. by Lasse R. Gammelgaard et al. (review)

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• Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited ed. by Lasse R. Gammelgaard et al.
• Alex Crayon

Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited. Edited by Lasse R. Gammelgaard, Stefan Iversen, Louise Brix Jacobsen, James Phelan, Richard Walsh, Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen, and Simona Zetterberg-Nielsen. Ohio State University Press, 2022. 338 pp.

Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited is a collection of essays that, building on Richard Walsh's 2007 book The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction, seeks to probe the nature of fictionality: a theoretical approach (grounded in but not restricted to fiction) that "gets its purchase on the actual by inviting us to set aside the constraints of direct reference to the actual and assume invention or some other mode of indirection" (5). Underscoring the pervasive occurrence of fictionality across forms and contexts—novels, advertisements, speeches, and comics, to name a few—and emphasizing that fictionality is distinct from the truth–falsehood binary, this anthology stakes a claim that fictionality is a rhetorical mode of effective and affective communication. One contributor puts it simply: "rhetorical fictionality compels us to look more closely at what fiction does, and to what effect" (81). This book is well-suited for use in English courses across the disciplinary spectrum—literature, rhetoric and composition, and creative writing—as either the central text or as an anthology from which an instructor might excerpt an essay. As a fiction writer myself, I found this analytic text both challenging [End Page 165] and illuminating; this collection of essays prompted me to reexamine my own writing process and product. Altogether, Fictionality and Literature is a comprehensive interrogation of the rhetoric of fictionality—its origins, its applications, and its potentials—that centers utility and implementation.

After the introduction, the book delves into the second part of its title—and Literature—by addressing a wide-ranging array of literary terms and concepts to push the boundaries of what, exactly, fictionality is and can do. Beginning with a consideration of authorial intent (central to a rhetorical understanding of fictionality), and moving to the concepts of narrator, plot, character, consciousness, metaphor, paratext, and intertextuality, these essays examine the rhetorical characteristics embedded in both fictional and nonfictional works. The book then examines metafiction and metalepsis, the novel, poetry, and literary nonfiction to highlight a cross-section of genres and forms where fictionality might and does arise. Finally, the concluding sections on ethics and social justice grapple with fictionality's moral power and political consequences. Each essay concerns itself with both the legacy and the future of fictionality, with a keen eye to the rhetoric of the present.

The first analytical chapter of the collection, "Author" by Henrik Zetterberg-Nielsen, contests the popular "death of the author" notion and argues that authorial intent is an important—nay, necessary—interpretive lens, ultimately contending that a rhetorical theory of fictionality hinges on the presumption that "everything in the story has to be the result of the choices of an author, who emphatically invents rather than reports" (43). Sylvie Patron's chapter "Narrator" discusses the genealogy of the literary narrator before integrating and critiquing Walsh's earlier definition of the concept. Patron underscores the communicative aspect of fictionality theory when she reaffirms the invented (and sometimes fickle) nature of narration: "always consider the narrator as a creation of the author, a creation that may in certain cases be neither continuous nor consistent" (57).

"Plot" by Wendy Veronica Xin discusses the competing drives of mimesis and aesthetics and highlights fictionality's start-and-stop capabilities, which keep the reader in a pleasurable narrative limbo between knowing and not knowing—what Xin describes as "a tantalizing cycle of disclosure and withholding, confession and suppression" (77). [End Page 166] H. Porter Abbott writes similarly about character in the chapter of the same title, reckoning with readers' tension in the "distinction between characters and persons" (97). According to Abbott, characters' inherent fictionality, their simultaneous personhood and non-personhood, creates this friction between the ontological and the fictional and underscores characters' inferential existence as artifacts. Then, in her chapter "Consciousness," Maria Mäkelä turns to the invented mind-space of characters, which she forwards as an accessible...