This will be the second blog post in which I make reference to a piece of writing that DKJ linked to at the end of last week. The piece is written by Sarah Hoffman, and it is a critique of various views of fiction, some of which we read last week. While reading Hoffman’s piece, there was one point that specifically struck me as being significantly important and veracious.
Hoffman comments on Currie at one point in her writing, and although we were not required to read Currie, I still felt that her point was extremely relevant to our class discussions. Hoffman states that Currie makes a major mistake when maintaining that fictitious works exist on a lexical basis that is completely independently from normal lexical usage. In other words, the denotation and connotation of words in a work of fiction have absolutely no relationship to their meanings in the so-called “real-world”. I completely agree with Hoffman in that this idea is completely erroneous. Furthermore, although this idea may seem clearly wrong to a lot of people, it seems that throughout our discussions in class, there are some that still hold this view.
I think that that is absolutely egregious that it is maintained by many that the world created by a piece of fictitious work holds no relationship with the non-fictional world. Although the meaning of words in a work of fiction can have novel meanings, that would seem to have no relationship to their meaning in its conventional context, there is no way in which it can have no relationship. Hoffman illustrates this when she states, “But we know that sentences in fiction do not have novel fictional meanings—they have the same meanings that they have when used in non-fictional contexts. So fiction cannot be characterized by some unique speech act(s)” (Hoffmann 8). I thought it was important that Hoffman made this statement because I think the misconception that word meanings in works of fiction exist completely independent of their normal use if far too prevalent.
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