LUULE- JA PÄRISLUGUDE ERISTUS TEOORIAS JA PRAKTIKAS I
The Distinction between Fictional and Factual Narratives in Critical Theory and Practice

Summary/Abstract: the article proceeds from the question: why no attempt seems to have been made to write a comprehensive and general history of fictionality? Considering the recent vogue of histories of food, sexuality, food, self, truth etc, it looks strange. Presumably the reasons for the lack of such a history are both conceptual and empirical. among the former, the absence of an agreed conception of fictionality is the most prominent, and among the latter the cursory nature of evidence about the authors’ and readers’ attitudes in distant past. In studying the history of fictionality, five aspects should be distinguished: fiction as a phenomenon, fiction as a concept, fiction as an institution, fiction as a conception, fiction as a word (signifier). Various analytical approaches and levels for determining the features which distinguish fictional from factual discourse are discussed. the philosophical theories of fictionality tend to concentrate on the question of the essence of fictionality, while literary historians’ interests lie in the signals of fictionality which allow us to recognize a text as a fiction. such differences in the current approaches result in limited applicability of the findings of theoretical fictionality studies to empirical historical research.

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