Whereas in an earlier book I looked briefly at fiction from the point of view of orality and literacy, in this chapter our concern will be with a restriction on the use of the term ‘fiction’, in opposition to what I regard as unsatisfactory views that have also been put forward. Basically, this chapter deals with how readers were more easily able, in the act of reading, to recognise the presence of fictionality than were listeners, since for readers any narratorial references to an oral recital were not immediately relevant and were therefore imaginary (fiktive Mündlichkeit). The position was not so obvious for listeners. Although they would recognise these references as bearing on their reception of a work, as being therefore ‘real’ (as they were not for readers qua readers), they could also see that Hartmann von Aue, for example, imputed questions to his fictive audience which no one in the real audience had actually asked, but which they could well imagine being asked at a recital and could therefore make-believe were possible. This situation (questions were not in fact asked that could conceivably have been asked) links the theme of this chapter to the definition of argumentum considered above.

The main thrust of the earlier book was to argue against a binary model, against the view that a reading reception of literature was necessarily in contradiction to hearing its recital and that the two modes of reception were mutually exclusive.