Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Editors Michael Hoffman and Patrick Murphy.

Duke
University Press: Durham and London, 2005.

Introduction
Hoffman y Murphy se preguntan quin fue el primer narrador de historias. No hay ningn
pueblo que no haya contado historias.
La teora literaria es el uso de las ciencias sociales, la filosofa, la retrica, la lingstica y
el anlisis structural para la interpretacin de textos.
Las ficciones de las cuales Aristteles escribi estaban escritas en verso o dilogo, no las
formas de prosa ficticia que predominan en nuestro tiempo, como la novela y el cuento.
CITA IMPORTANTE:
The rising literacy that always accompanies trade and technology created an
expanded reading public hungry for stories of people like themselves, in prose like
that of the newspapers, journals, and scientific treatises that had come to dominate
the new technology of print (3).
Henry James fue un pionero de la teora literaria. Para James, escribir ficcin no era solo
una forma de entretenimiento sino tambin una forma seria de arte.
REFERENCIA IMPORTANTE:
The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth
CITA IMPORTANTSIMA:
Wayne Booth apunt en su The Rhetoric of Fiction que not only had some of the
greatest novels never striven for such purity but that in no work of fiction did the
author ever disappear; judgements were always present in the narrative tone and in
all the various kinds of irony available to the narrator and the implied author (8).
Entonces surge la pregunta si la marca del autor de una nota periodstica tampoco
desaparece y est presente implcitamente escondida bajo la supuesta esttica
objetiva de la escritura periodstica.
CITA IMPORTANTE:
Are novels representations of reality, or are they all made up? How obliged are
novelists to make what happens in their texts compare with what might have happened
had the same events occurred in the real world? Is verisimilitude, for instance, an
obligation for a writer? (10).
Los autores se preguntan si podemos pensar la realidad de la ficcin de la misma manera
que pensamos la historia o nuestras propias vidas.

TIEMPO Y ESPACIO
CITA IMPORTANTSIMA: we demand that novels and stories be plausible within the
terms of their own fictional world, and that such plausibility be measured not against
whether that universe is truly a represented world but whether it is analogous to our own
that if some things happen, then other things will follow, just as they might were we
living in a universe constructed like the one in that made-up world (10).
Prose fiction is a temporal medium. It takes time for the reader of a novel to absorb its
words, assimilate its concepts, and perceive its various elements. Characters are
developed, and plots unfold in time. Like a symphony, a novel frequently shifts from one
moment to the next, and the development of a given passage depends on other passages
that have preceded it Even in fictions characterized primarily by straightforward,
continuous chronology, the time of reading is almost always at variance with the time the
plot takes to unfold: almost all novels cover a longer period of time than the number of
hours even a slow reader might take to finish the book As applied to fiction, space is
even more metaphoric than the concept of time. (11).