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According to the dominant theory of intentionalism, fiction and non-fiction are in a 'mix-and-match' relationship with truth and falsity: both fiction and nonfiction can be either true or false. Intentionalists hold that fiction is a property of a narrative that is intended to elicit not belief but imagination or make-belief in virtue of the audience's recognizing that such is the intention of the fiction-maker. They claim that in unlikely circumstances these fictions can turn out to be accidentally true. On the contrary, I argue in this paper that fictionality and truth are incompatible. I distinguish narratives based on whether they contain invented characters or not, and offer respective sets of arguments to the effect that there is no case when a fiction is accidentally true. A narrative is either fiction or accidentally true but not both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely held in theories of narrative that all works of literary narrative fiction include a narrator who fictionally tells the story. However, it is also granted that the personal qualities of a narrator may be more or less radically effaced. Recently, philosophers and film theorists have debated whether movies similarly involve implicit audio-visual narrators. Those who answer affirmatively allow that these cinematic narrators will be radically effaced. Their opponents deny that audio-visual narrators figure in the ontology of movies at all, and many have argued that the ‘effaced’ literary narrator is an illusion as well. In this paper, I attempt to sort out the central issues that arise in these debates, defending the existence of effaced narrators in both literature and film. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Wilson has defended the thesis that even impersonal third-person fictional narratives should be taken to contain fictional narrations and have fictional narrators. This, he argues, is necessary if we are to explain how readers can take themselves, in their imaginative engagement with fictions, to have knowledge of the things they are imagining. I argue that there is at least one class of impersonal third-person fictional narratives—thought experiments—to which Wilson’s model fails to apply, and that this reveals more general problems with his argument. I further argue that there is no good reason to think that Wilson’s account applies more restrictedly to those impersonal third-person fictional narratives that feature in standard works of literary fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I discuss Gregory Currie’s taxonomy of explanations of the fictional. On the one hand, there is an important kind of relation between internal and external explanations of some fictional truths that Currie leaves out, where both are salient and yet in a relation of harmony with each other. On the other hand, I do not see that he has established that there is a genuine relation of tension between some pairs of internal and external explanations, and thus I question the usefulness of the category of collapse. I also consider a further kind of explanation: the exterior explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]