The Edges of Fiction

In The Edges of Fiction, the author examines how fiction reshapes our understanding of reality, challenging conventional narratives and exploring unexpected outcomes.

What sets fiction apart from everyday experience is not the absence of reality but an abundance of rationality, a concept rooted in Aristotle's Poetics. This rationality manifests in the inversion of appearances, where fiction challenges the linear progression of events to reveal how unexpected outcomes emerge, transforming happiness into sorrow and ignorance into insight. The Edges of Fiction delves into this intriguing dynamic, exploring how fiction reshapes our understanding of reality itself.

In contemporary society, Rancière posits that this rationality of fiction has evolved significantly. While social sciences have sought to establish causal connections across various human activities, thereby aiming to rationalize all aspects of life, literature has taken a different route. Rather than democratizing the rationality of fiction to encompass all human experiences, literature has instead dismantled the boundaries that define its unique reality. It has embraced the spontaneity of life, capturing the essence of those fleeting moments that encapsulate an entire existence.

The exploration within The Edges of Fiction spans a diverse array of figures, from Stendhal to João Guimarães Rosa, and from Marx to Sebald. It tackles the fundamental question of how we can construct perceptible forms of a shared world, both in the explicit narratives of literature and the implicit narratives found in politics, social science, and journalism. This book illuminates the evolving nature of modern fiction and its confrontation with the very essence of reality.