The Limits of Fiction

Two-day workshop on the 28th and 29th of November at Collège de France (Paris) on the limits of fiction, organized by François Recanati and Merel Semeijn. Our call for abstract submissions is closed. Please contact us (thelimitsoffiction2024@gmail.com) in case you would like to attend this event.

Workshop theme
This workshop brings together researchers that explore the limits of the concept of ‘fiction’, or the limits of fiction itself. Topics of interest include: 

• What are limit cases of fiction?

• What phenomena can we explain by reference to the ‘fictive stance’ and what phenomenon can we not explain in this way?

• Investigations into non-standard/understudied fictions (e.g., metafiction, irony, video-games, virtual reality, fanfiction, etc.) and their theoretical ramifications for philosophy of fiction in general

• The fiction/non-fiction border

• The relation between fiction and concepts such as ‘illusion’, ‘deception’, ‘dreams’, etc. 

• The fictional ‘periphery’

• Discourses that are not part of a fiction (i.e., not ‘fictional discourse’), but for which the concept of ‘fiction’ or a ‘fictive stance’ may still have some explanatory power (e.g., metafictional, parafictional, interfictional, counterfictional discourse, etc.). 

• etc.

Keynotes

• Stacie Friend (University of Edinburgh) Fiction and Non-fiction: The Borderlands

• Enrico Terrone (Università degli Studi di Genova) The Two Borders of Fiction: Believing and Entertaining

Accepted speakers

• Sara Bernstein (University of Notre Dame) Borderline Fiction 

• Manuel García-Carpintero (Universitat de Barcelona) "Fictive Stance" vs. Mere Pretense Views of Fictionality: Explanatory Virtues

• Irene Lonigro (University of Milan ‘La Statale’) Lower-Level and Higher-Level Resistance: Towards a Unified Account of Imaginative Resistance

• Daniel Nolan (University of Notre Dame) Evaluating Global Fictionalism

• Elisa Paganini (University of Milan) Fiction as Non-Assertive Communication

• Victor Popa (Ecole Normale Supérieure) The Butterfly Effect

• Irene Romero Suarez (Birkbeck College) Do inaccuracies matter in fiction?

• Louis Rouillé (FNRS/ULiège) A new "quasi" solution to the paradox of fiction

• Mario Slugan (Queen Mary University of London) Fictional Periphery and the Status of Nondiegetic Music and Extradiegetic Narrators

• Nele Van de Mosselaer (Tilburg University) Genetic Game Criticism - Uncovering Fictional Truths through Unauthorized Use

• Richard Woodward (Humboldt Universität Berlin) Silly Questions

Alternate speaker

• Francesco Cagnin (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia) Moving the boundaries of fiction: between imaginative resistance and collectivity

Feel free to email us in case you have questions: thelimitsoffiction2024@gmail.com