Appearing at the tail end of this volume, I begin with a brief meditation on the coda. A (musical) ending, the vulgar form of cauda (tail or privy member), figure of our fallen state, the coda may also be a whip or goad to inspiration or even exaltation. Attempting to turn my posterior position to good ends, I have, in the place of an ending, used the chapters here as provocations and inspirations. Recognizing in them a more expansive account of legal performance than my own, I point to how they unbind law and performance from the rigid definitional strictures on which I have relied, how they challenge the boundaries between text and performance, performance and law, law and world, world and fiction (the veritas falsa of theatre and the falsitas verus of law), how they show the methodological Über-Ich (with its rules and dogmas) to be unseated by an ontological Id that scoffs at its laws. That force – like the comedic cauda in the courtroom – answers legal solemnities with impudent laughter and other “minor jurisprudences of refusal,” creating heterotopias, wild zones, rehearsals for alternative futures.

Chapter 5 thus turns to the “old quarrel between philosophy and poetry”. Whereas my starting point in Chapter 4 was the paradox of the written critique of writing, here I begin with the apparent contradiction of Plato’s mimetic critique of mimesis in the Republic. For Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger, this is key to understanding Plato’s critique of poetry: Plato does not condemn mimesis entirely. Instead, he subordinates the imaginative and persuasive powers of imitative poetry to philosophical goals and thus weaves poetry and imitation into his own masterful compositions. All three readings point differently but decisively to the limits of autonomous or unaided philosophical discourse, and therewith anticipate some of Heidegger’s insights on the necessity of something like poetic thinking.

This essay brings together the Jamesian will to believe with Coleridge’s famous description of the willing suspension of disbelief to offer a theory of fiction as a real-making practice. It begins by situating James’s writing on belief in relation to his thoughts on the “sense of reality” and then drawing out some distinctive features of his approach: For instance, instead of treating reality like an on/off switch (something is either real or it’s not), he treats it like a dial that can be turned up and down in volume. Belief is less about specific doctrines, for James, and more about the fundamental stance through which reality is perceived or rendered. The second part of the essay tests this Jamesian perspective against a novel that is itself about the relation between fiction and belief: J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. It ends by specifying the particular place of literary fictions within the broader category of belief and asking if literary critics are best thought of as believers, knowers, or both.

Cohen was first known as a poet, and on the basis of his first volume of poetry he was described as Canada’s leading poet. As the 1965 documentary Ladies and Gentleman, Mr. Leonard Cohen attests, he became a celebrity in Canada on the basis of his poetry even before he had recorded an album. He continued to publish poetry throughout his career, and the relationship of the poems to the lyrics is interesting and complicated. Cohen’s early poetry is more modernist, largely eschewing rhyme or regular rhythm, while his later poems are often similar to his lyrics. Poetry inhabits both novels in various ways. Lawrence Breavman enjoys a first name that nods to and withdraws Lawrentian possibilities, and the strategies of the poet are all over Beautiful Losers: repetition, anaphora, listing, grammatical and syntactical dislocation, a variety of forms, symbolism, making strange, surrealism. Sometimes, Cohen publishes his song lyrics as poems, sometimes verbatim, sometimes in a different form. Other poems are quite different from his songs set to music, yet he seems to have thought of his poems and lyrics collectively as “songs.”

The chapter appraises David Lewis’s seminal work on truth in fiction. This will allow us to make an important distinction between three uses of fictive discourse, including the one that Lewis’s work focuses on: discourse characterizing the content of fictions. The chapter examines variations of standard criticisms of Lewis’s account, aiming to show that, if developed as Lewis suggests in his 1983 “Postscript A,” his proposals on the topic are – as Hanley puts it – as good as it gets. Thus elaborated, Lewis’s account can resist these objections, and it offers a better picture of fictional discourse than recent resurrections of other classic works of the 1970s by Kripke, van Inwagen, and Searle. The turn that Lewis suggests, and which the chapter recommends, draws on the remaining outstanding contribution from that time, that of Walton, which is to be examined in Chapter 3.

Imaginings play a crucial role in accounting for fictionality, but what are they? Focusing on those invited by fictions, this chapter argues for the deflationary view that imaginings are just entertainings, I=E. This view was standard in early analytic philosophy, but few current writers appear to hold it. The chapter critically addresses an argument by Walton against I=E that may contribute to explaining this turn; some who espouse views that are otherwise close to I=E endorse this argument against it. In response to Walton’s argument, the chapter invokes a point suggested by Walton himself: Many imaginings – i.e., entertainings, on the view defended here – are mental episodes that agents launch for a purpose. The chapter also appeals to this fact to dispose of a miscellany of other contemporary considerations against I=E. In addition to answering objections, the chapter offers a positive consideration in favor of I=E: to wit, that it may help to establish the imagination as a fundamental, irreducible mental attitude – a view that many philosophers do endorse.

Fictional discourse is, primarily, discourse that is used to produce literary fictions; but there is also the ‘metafictional’ discourse used to talk about fictions, i.e., to report their contents or other features. On a traditional view articulated by Searle, primary fictional discourse doesn’t have any specific semantics; sentences there just have the semantics that they would have in their standard uses. Fiction-makers convey their fictions by pretending to use sentences in their standard ways without doing so, and without giving them a specific, dedicated representational point with a semantics of its own. This Mere Pretense view is less popular nowadays than it used to be. A question the now more popular alternative Dedicated Representation view raises is: What is the contribution of intuitively empty names to such a dedicated semantics? Many supporters of the traditional Mere Pretense view, including Searle, argue that, in the metafictional uses to which they grant a semantics, apparently empty names are not in fact empty; rather, they each refer to some more or less exotic entity. Some of those who grant a dedicated semantics to primary fictional discourse, like Salmon and others, extend this realist view to it. This chapter aims to uphold considerations that have already been raised by irrealists against these proposals, by highlighting their counterintuitive features and explaining in our theoretical setting why they are bad.

Some fictions have explicit narrators, like Marcel in À la recherche du temps perdu, Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories, or the unnamed first-person teller in Don Quixote. Explicit narrators are less common in fiction films, but there are some – the late Joe Gillis in Wilder’s 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, and Addison DeWitt in Mankiewicz’s 1952 film All About Eve. This chapter addresses the debate on whether there are covert fictional narrators in most or all fictions, which is assumed, for instance, in David Lewis’s account of truth in fiction. The chapter argues that many fictions, in literature, theater, and film, do have covert narrators, although they may well “fade into the background and have little or no significance for criticism or appreciation,” as Kendall Walton put it. Nevertheless, like Walton (and George Wilson), I reject their ubiquity. To that effect, the chapter relies on the constitutive-rules speech-act account of fictionality that was defended in Chapters 2 and 3 to elaborate on two distinctions suggested by Wilson, and to defend on that basis effaced fictional narrators, by developing his ‘silly question’ reply to skeptics’ arguments against covert narrators.

The recreative view of the imagination sees it as a ‘mirror’ of basic mental attitudes: There are imaginative (pretend) variants of beliefs, i-beliefs (ordinarily called imaginings), i-seeings (visualizings), i-desires, i-emotions … the imagination is ‘half of psychic life’, as Meinong put it. The single attitude rival view sees the imagination instead as a sui generis nonderivative mental attitude, with distinctive traits: distinctive functional roles, distinctive norms to which it is beholden, and a distinctive phenomenology. This chapter confronts a recent argument by analogy for i-desires, due to Greg Currie, which is based on an alleged parallel between beliefs and desires. The chapter argues in response that this argument fails because the parallel on which it relies fails to obtain on different influential accounts of desires. The discussion strengthens responses to earlier arguments for i-desires.

This chapter examines the ‘parliamentary novel’, a genre developed in the mid nineteenth century by Benjamin Disraeli and Anthony Trollope, as more Britons gained the right to vote. These novels often served to educate new voters about the virtues of the parliamentary system, portraying statesmen as noble figures and reinforcing traditional parliamentary ideals for an industrial society. The chapter surveys this genre, focusing on authors with first-hand experience in Parliament or close connections to MPs. It traces the genre’s evolution, particularly its post-1945 transformation from respected literature to what Gerald Kaufman labelled ‘trash’. While considering broader works by authors like Jeffrey Archer and Michael Dobbs, the chapter centres on Maurice Edelman and Edwina Currie. The motives behind these novels varied, but male authors in the genre’s classic period typically aimed to celebrate Parliament. However, as female authors emerged in the 1990s, they shifted the genre’s focus from glorifying male heroes to critiquing both these figures and Parliament itself, reflecting a growing scepticism towards male-dominated politics and altering the genre’s original celebratory purpose.

This chapter argues that not only the author but also the implied audiences and situations of the Johannine texts are fictionalized. It also critiques the longstanding scholarly reconstruction of a “Johannine Community,” proposing alternative ways of contextualizing these works.

We have seen how imagination can plausibly be taken to be part of a perceptual referential apparatus. Sensory imaginations therefore contribute to the fulfillment of an empirical intuition’s cognitive roles. The aim of the analysis in this chapter is three-fold: (1) to throw more light upon what is added by imagination to empirical cognition of objects, in the form of perceptual memories and quasi-perceptual anticipations – this is lower order objectification that goes beyond mere perceptual objectification in its own right but which may also be part of higher order objectification through concepts; (2) to show how imagination that mixes with perceptions may also lead to false perceptual judgments – misperception is a topic of this chapter, whereas hallucination is discussed in Chapter 9; (3) to bring out the lack of reality-character of fictional imaginations, even when these imitate perceptions, so as to throw more light upon the nature of perceptions.

This chapter focuses on the diverse manifestations of the feminist movement in Africa and its impact on African literature. It further examines how African women’s writing has contributed to African feminist theorizations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Borrowing Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi’s idea of reading African women’s writing as “theorized fiction” or “fictionalized theory,” the chapter considers, among other issues, how twentieth and twenty-first-century African women’s writing has grappled with questions of gender and how gender is variously conferred and defined; questions of motherhood and how it is configured and contested; and questions of sexuality and the female body. The chapter also pays close attention to the epistemic shifts and various decolonial trajectories that obtain in African feminist thinking and how these are enunciated in African literature.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, young and mostly urban Egyptian men and boys started writing in new ways. Inspired by the recent emergence of mass-circulated print fiction in both books and periodicals, they became infatuated with writing fiction. Their writerly endeavours often clashed with the textual preferences of their fathers, and represented a major shift in the understanding of what written texts are for, and who can write them.

This chapter invites consideration of Bloomsbury as the Biography group. It details Bloomsbury’s founding and defining contributions to the “New Biography,” particularly in theoretical and creative works by Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, and the most influential British biographer of the past century, Lytton Strachey. Focusing its attention most carefully on the latter two, it explores how both Woolf and Strachey, as “spiritual” writers of the modernist age (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”), understood biography as a means of revealing personality, while diverging on some essential matters. Woolf, whose initial understanding of biography as an art evolved into a more subdued description of it as (mere) craft, anticipated that this aim might be accomplished through archival assiduity over time by a succession of fact-bound biographers, each bringing a different perspective to facts, old and new. Strachey, for his part, who always considered biography an art form, thought such an aim might be accomplished in the present, using fictional means to reveal both the personality of the nominal biographical subject and the personality of the biographer. This chapter finally reads Strachey as the most important progenitor of biographical fiction.