The Edges of Fiction

Jacques Rancière, Steve Corcoran

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English

Polity Press
04 October 2019

Literature: history & criticism; Philosophy

What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality – this was the thesis of Aristotle’s Poetics. The rationality of fiction is that appearances are inverted. Fiction overturns the ordinary course of events that occur one after the other, aiming to show how the unexpected arises, happiness transforms into unhappiness and ignorance into knowledge.

In the modern age, argues Rancière, this fictional rationality was developed in new ways. The social sciences extended the model of causal linkage to all spheres of human action, seeking to show us how causes produce their effects by inverting appearances and expectations. Literature took the opposite path. Instead of democratizing fictional rationality to include all human activity in the world of rational knowledge, it destroyed its principles by abolishing the limits that circumscribed a reality peculiar to fiction. It aligned itself with the rhythms of everyday life and plumbed the power of the “random moment” into which an entire life is condensed.

In the avowed fictions of literature as well as in the unavowed fictions of politics, social science or journalism, the central question is the same: how to construct the perceptible forms of a shared world. From Stendhal to João Guimarães Rosa and from Marx to Sebald, via Balzac, Poe, Maupassant, Proust, Rilke, Conrad, Auerbach, Faulkner and some others, this book explores these constructions and sheds new light on the constitutive movement of modern fiction, the movement that shifted its centre of gravity from its traditional core toward those edges in which fiction gets confronted with its possible revocation.

By: Jacques Rancière
Translated by: Steve Corcoran
Imprint: Polity Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 211mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9781509530441
ISBN 10: 1509530444
Pages: 180
Publication Date: 04 October 2019
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Acknowledgements Introduction Doors and Windows Behind the Windows The Eyes of the Poor What Voyeurs See Window with a Street View The Threshold of Science The Commodity’s Secret Causality’s Adventures The Shores of the Real The Unimaginable Paper Landscapes The Edge of the All and the Nothing The Random Occurrence Two Stories of Poor People The Mute’s Speech The Measureless Moment

Jacques Rancière is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Paris-St. Denis.

Reviews for The Edges of Fiction

‘A probing and scintillating new book on the meaning, rationality and politics of literary fiction. Rancière illuminates the surprising connection between the logic of tragedy, in which ignorance leads to misfortune, and explanation in the modern social sciences. He interrogates how that paradigm slowly unwinds into the democratizing tumult of modernism. An invaluable addition to our understanding of a topic Rancière has made his own: the aesthetic conditions of political reason.’ J.M. Bernstein, The New School for Social Research