Fictionality as an interdisciplinary problem

The concept of fictionality participates in the discourses of more than one discipline and understanding fictionality therefore requires an interdisciplinary approach. Fictionality is a distinctive property of literary texts and as such it forms a natural topic for literary research. Fictional texts also posit a reality of their own that casts doubt on basic notions in logic and semantics and as such fictional worlds can be expected to interest philosophers. Yet the histories of the two disciplines show that fictionality has attracted only sporadic and limited attention from both literary and philosophical quarters. It is only in recent years that the two disciplines have come to share an interest in fictionality; furthermore, it is only in recent years that the two disciplines, when addressing the question of fiction, have started to refer to the same object of research. Until the mid seventies fictionality was an object of separate disciplinary pursuits: it was interpreted as a property of texts by literary theorists and either excluded as logical abnormality or entirely ignored by philosophers. That is, although traditional literary theory did not ignore the problem of fiction, it has regarded the fictionality of texts as an inner type of organization, largely disregarding the fact that being fictional, by definition, refers to the relations between a world and what lies beyond its boundaries. Recent years have witnessed a serious attempt on the part of literary theorists to go beyond the boundaries of the literary text and to address the concept of fictionality in a larger cultural context.