Samuli Björninen

We intuitively know that fictions are often instructive, either in the moral or more broadly epistemological sense, but what are the implications of instructivity for the fictionality of fictions? The chapter looks into the uses of lectures in fiction. The lecture, a real-life instructive and non-fictional form, is contextualized within theories of fictional instructivity, and the embedment of lectures in fiction is theorized within the rhetorical accounts of fictionality and factuality. One of the key arguments in the rhetorical theory of fictionality is that fictional communication has no direct informative relevance. The case of the fictional lecture allows us a look behind the apparent simplicity of this claim and also to think about the question of instructivity in fictionality theory more broadly. The chapter also presents three distinct functions that lectures can have in novels. The different functions of lectures are illustrated in analyses of three contemporary novels: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (2011), Oneiron by Laura Lindstedt (2018/ 2015), and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (2016). The analyses also show that there is more theoretical work needed on the diverse ways in which fictional and factual genres interact within the frame of fiction. A deeper understanding of these interactions will also help us articulate why fictions are capable of spreading misinformation and how they may contribute to the contemporary epistemological crises. Inversely, increased awareness of fictional and factual registers, genres and rhetoric will help us navigate the epistemologically precarious contemporary culture.

The article presents a method for studying the factuality of narrative as a rhetoric. The need for such a method is apparent in the so-called post-truth climate, which sees us witnessing debates about semantic chimeras like "alternative facts" and "fake news." The article arrives at its method by tackling challenges arising both in narrative theory and in fictionality studies. This involves developing models that let us take into account both the effects of local discursive features and the "macrogeneric" and "generic" frames guiding expectations about how communication is meant to work. The method is used in analysis of one of the controversial stories by the journalist Claas Relotius, who is currently being investigated in the forgery scandal of the magazine Der Spiegel.

At first glance, Wolfgang Iser seems to share little ground with pioneers of poetics like Tzvetan Todorov and Benjamin Harshav, who explicitly excluded interpretation from the province of poetics. Indeed, if Iser has any connection with poetics, and this article argues that he does, it is via the critical fringes of poetics, where excluding interpretation from systematic study of literature was never seen as an option one could choose. Although poetics versus hermeneutics was one of the major theoretical themes of the late 1970’s, Iser can be better understood in the context of critical thought aiming to avoid the strict opposition between the two. Delving in turn into Iser’s theory, his analytical practice, and theory of poetics, this essay points out several points where dialogue between Iser’s work and the endeavor of systematic poetics can be productive.

Facts and Narratives: Conceptualizing Narrative in Postmodern Critiques of Knowledge and Contemporary Science Debates

The article asks what it means to claim that science is (a) narrative or produces narratives. Specifically, it focuses on the rhetorical move that dismisses scientific theories or results as narratives, laden with ideological purposes. This rhetoric is traced to two theoretical battlegrounds of the 1980’s and the 1990’s. Firstly, to the polarized positions of the science wars, which pitted “scientific realists” against “postmodern” thinkers. Secondly, this rhetoric often operates with a conception of narrative derived from Jean-François Lyotard’s postmodern critique of “grand narratives.” In addition to these historical lines, the article analyzes some of the less polarizing ways in which sciences are said to involve narrative practices.

Kirjallisuushistoriassa uudelleen ja uudelleen artikuloituva romaanin tehtävä näyttää olevan koetun todellisuuden ja elämän pohjimmaisen problematiikan tavoittaminen.
Siksi realismin todenkaltaisuus määritellään aina uudelleen suhteessa ihmiskäsityksen ja maailmankuvan muutoksiin. Jaakko Yli-Juonikkaan Neuromaani-romaanin (2012) realismi voidaankin liittää aivotieteen ajan ihmiskuvaan – erityisesti neurorealismiksi kutsuttuun ajatusmalliin, jonka mukaan kokemukset ovat todellisia vain, jos niille voidaan löytää aivokuvassa havaittavat korrelaatit.

Narrative After Postmodernism takes a critical and practical look at the cultural theories of what comes after postmodernism or the postmodern. Alongside contemporary literary authors, the anthology studies diverse contemporary textual phenomena from TV shows to online fan theories and survivalist blogs. The essays compiled in this anthology tentatively apply the theories of the post-postmodern to contemporary texts to see how they might open up for analysis within their new theoretical frameworks or challenge them. The introduction, co-written by all the authors of this volume, introduces the most influential theories of post-postmodernism and contextualizes them within broader intellectual trends of the early 21st Century. The three essays comprising the first part of the volume discuss some of the theories of the postmodern in relation to contemporary works that seem to challenge them. Yet they also strive to clarify and sharpen some of the ideas proposed in the theories of the p...

This PhD thesis focuses on the relations between literary poetics, theories of reading, and the interpretive criticism of an author's work. My approach to this field is through the abundant scholarly writings on the American author Thomas Pynchon, and, in particular, academic readings of his novels. I am trying to study the protocols of reading involved in literary study by mapping out the space between the individual and often idiosyncratic scholarly interpretations and the theories of literary poetics. To this end, poetics is reframed in this work as a theory of reading. In this I am taking my cue from Jonathan Culler, literary phenomenology, and Reader-Response critics. Thus understood, poetics studies those processes of perception, understanding and cognition that underlie textual interpretation and analysis. Within this orientation, the questions of poetics closely resemble those that are today posed in cognitive literary studies, the empirical studies of reading, and postclassical narratology.
The present study rereads the theory of poetics and shows that many devices and textual strategies it describes can be usefully understood as procedures of reading. This is done by looking at the analytical choices made in readings of Pynchon and describing them in terms of reader-oriented poetics. This method zones in on the empirical observation made by many Pynchon scholars. While we generally consider the author’s thematic scope as singularly eclectic as his repertoire of literary means, time and time again we seem to reach the same conclusions: the same themes emerge as crucial, the same devices are regarded as significant, and the same passages from the novels are cited because of their capability to encapsulate something of the elusive whole. But what makes certain themes more or less central? How do some of Pynchon’s structural experiments become so decisive in determining what the novels mean or what they are about? Why are certain key passages so crucial to interpreting the novels?
In answering these questions, the study toes the line between conventions of reading and the cognitive processing of texts. It is discovered that the procedures of reading identified as structural metaphor, miniature analogy, and thematization straddle the heuristic divide. These procedures are, on one hand, institutional and cultural, in how they appeal to convention and tradition. Yet, on the other hand, they contain a component that can be only described as cognitive or perceptual.
The latter part of the study focuses more firmly on Pynchon’s debut novel V. (1963) and its scholarly readings. The theoretical interest in the protocols and procedures of reading is employed as a method for reading the novel and studying how it has been read. As literary scholar Robert Scholes has written, our protocols of reading will yield to methodization only up to a point. This study approaches that point through terrain on which the reading procedures of literary scholarship are entangled with the more general processes of cognition, perception, and interpretation.

The article presents a method for studying the factuality of narrative as a rhetoric. The need for such a method is apparent in the so-called post-truth climate, which sees us witnessing debates about semantic chimeras like “alternative facts” and “fake news.” The article arrives at its method by tackling challenges arising both in narrative theory and in fictionality studies. This involves developing models that let us take into account both the effects of local discursive features and the “macrogeneric” and “generic” frames guiding expectations about how communication is meant to work. The method is used in analysis of one of the controversial stories by the journalist Claas Relotius, who is currently being investigated in the forgery scandal of the magazine Der Spiegel.