Something to 'think' about next time you read fiction

 

An illustration from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, depicting the fictional protagonist, Alice, playing a fantastical game of croquet.

Literature is a transient category. In literature, fiction is presented in the name of fact; subjectivity in the name of objectivity.

Literary texts have been deemed to be metaphoric and allegorical composed of inventions rather than observed facts, this allows a wide latitude for the emotions, and the resulting speculations of the supposed genius of the authors.

As Raymond Williams has it, historically the refined sensibilities for 'reading'
functioned as a kind of 'court of appeal' in response to the perceived disclocations and vulgarity of industrial society.

The discourse of literature and fiction is inherently unstable for it (fiction) plays on the stratification of meaning,it narrates one thing in order to tell something else, it delineates itself in a language from which it continually draws effects of meaning that cannot be circumscribed or checked.

Subjectivity in the name of objectivity.

So there!

However this lays down a claim for objectivity, and to a heirarchy which also has to be put to the rack. For objectivity is not some unsullied lighthouse from which we can splay our objective view.  The lighthouse is in the sea  of language and we are unable to get outside of it to be truly 'objective'.

So there!

Recommended reading
Writing Culture, The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography  Clifford & Marcus