| While literary studies is often concerned with the intersection of representation, aesthetics, ethics, history, and language, several recent critics have turned their focus to fictionality as a central but underexplored quality of the literary text, reframing familiar questions, such as, "Why do we read fiction," "Can fiction be truthful?" and "Can fiction be fictional?" Invoking philosophy, psychology, narratology, and cognitive science, the answers to these questions have tended to stress the reader's reception of the text as a model of a reality---one that is either past, present, potential, or alternative. Despite a general, post-structuralist consensus that fictional characters are not in command of their narrated lives---are primarily symbolic, aesthetic, or discursive functions---contemporary analysis still depends on mimetic associations between characters' and readers' motivations, behavior, and power. Even where modernism exposes the seams of narrative construction and encourages readers to inspect texts as manufactured objects, criticism frequently conceives of the reader as initially attracted by the sympathetic, identifiable, or otherwise affective "truthfulness" of the text, wherein "truthfulness" implies a commonality between characters' and readers' experiences.;"This Isn't Really Happening: Fictions, Decisions, and the Unauthorized Modern" argues that treating narrative prose as fictional encourages readers not only to identify with inferred authorial perspectives over and against characterological personae but also to confront narrative fiction's generic resistance to images of individuated volition or exemplary motivation: i.e., agency. Treating trans-Atlantic realist novels, the project uses the representation of suicide as an exemplary characterological act whose significance is oversimplified when interpreted in terms of reader/character identification. Via this example, the dissertation traces how a narrative's structure, combined with the reader's willingness to pretend the characterological decision, exhibits an orchestrating power with which the reader relates and which ironically suggests that the reader has exactly the agency the character is unable to demonstrate. |
