Fictive Poetics

Based on Wolfgang Iser's literary anthropology, this essay begins literary fictionality's poetics value to explore the element problem of literary theory. Different from Northrop Frye's literary anthropology which focus on the prototype positivism, and "anthropological poetics" which study the culture subjectivity as well, his research is concentrated on the question why human need fiction.Wolfgang Iser established the poetics position of literary fictionality. He thinks that the fictive and the imaginary are always linked to the human dispositions and of the value of the anthropology. Story telling meets the fundamental need of human interchange. Unlike the religious fictionality that restrains freedom and the ideology fictionality that deceives people, literary fictionality, however, can satisfy human being's desires beyond what we are in reality to fulfill self-consciousness and self-transcendence. It not only reflects the reality but also creates "a possible world" blending the reality and the imagery well, allowing us to express what we may not express to experience the complicated life and existence of human beings.When we replace the customary antithesis of the fictional and the real with the triad of the real, the fictive and the imaginary, we can set the pattern of "literary anthropology". Fictive poetics think the act of fictionalizing is bond of the imaginary and the real, having three functions: Selection, Combination and Self-Disclosure. Selection, as a fictionalizing act, is related to the position and motive of author, revealing the intentionality of the text. The fictionalizing act of combination brings about a copresence of the realized and the absent, linking them together. And the Self-Disclosure creates illusion, helping readers to see the reality. So the literary fictionality is the author's imaginative creation based on the reality, but beyond the reality.Emphasizing its role of game is to acknowledge literary fictionality's entertaining function. In the text of game, the fictive and the imaginary develop themselves in the process of their interaction. The writing of the author and the reading of the reader are in condition of the ecstasy. When creating the figure, the author usually takes himself as it and forgetting the reality. So is with the reader. Ecstasy, as a staging in literature, can represent the plasticity of human. Staging self doesn't mean the self disappeared, but leaving the self exists in and out the reality. Literary fictionality is the staging of human's life, enabling us to express ourselves. Through it, we surpass the small self- world.Although Wolfgang Iser shows his cognition about the paradigms of the philosophical fiction, he doesn't regulate the paradigms of the literary fictionality, nor demonstrate the ethics and the truth of the literary fictionality. Based on Iser's heuristics of literary anthropology, we try to trace the paradigms, truth and ethics of the fictive poetics.The paradigms of the literary fictionality include four types: realistic, romantic, modernism and postmodernism fiction. The realistic paradigm represents the objective reality to describe human life. The romantic stresses that romantic is the basic disposition of human's surpassing reality, and it expresses the fervor, exposes the hideous reality, and expects the future. The modernism fictionality expresses the absurdity of human, and the anxiety in our reality. It points out that the world is an expression of the truth and the objects. The postmodernism fiction based on "fact from fiction", thinks of the reality as illusory. The four paradigms differ but co-exist, which can be adopted in the same time and by the same author. It is hard to tell which is better. We can't put all paradigms to one paradigm, because we judge the value of literary fictionality on the degrees of the truth of their revealing the reality.Literary fictionality is as true as the objective reality. It helps readers to feel the existence through the material of reality and history. Literary fictionality is not to find the truth, but to explore the space of truth and open up the new horizon of the future. The truth is of the disposition of human and the existence of the world instead of the individual. The great work is not the individual's observation and experience of the real life, but the universal value of all human beings. Therefore it is the truth of existence.Literary fictionality is based on and surpasses the moral in real life. Dateing from the real life, the ethics of literary fictionality revaluates the unreasonable reality ethics. It breaks through the moral and breaks forth new ethics. The personality of the author is not as same as the one in their work because the reality and the fiction are not same. Only when the author transcend the self-centric, expressing his life feeling, can he creates a possible world that surpass the reality and give insight into it. Reading the fictionality work, we can get the anthropological self-extend and self-transcend. So, literary fictionality, with the core of the esthetics experience, is fundamentally of universal humanity.Fictive Poetics, with the aid of the works of fiction, help readers transcend the real life, head for the free of heart, and enrich our life and realize our value as well.