X-Nico

4 unusual facts about Fiction theory


Fiction theory

Roman Jakobson, a Russian formalist and linguist, was one of the first individuals to discuss art as a way of communication that is intentionally aesthetic, and applied linguistics to analyses of literary texts.

The French scholar Roland Barthes designed a system of five major codes that function as tools to analyze narrative texts in ways that move beyond examinations of plot and structure, thereby bringing to the surface the subtle ways a text becomes a literary narrative.

Literary critic Thomas Pavel argues that the fictional world deserves to be examined on its own terms rather than merely through the lens of mimesis.

The scholar Marie-Laure Ryan is also concerned less with intention and more with the various ways that fictional worlds are related to the actual world outside the text.



see also

Gitte Mose

Winther, Per and Lothe, Jakob and Skei, Hans H. (ed.) The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, Columbia: U of South Carolina P (2004).