Dartmouth Events

Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Hannah Kim, University of Arizona

4:30pm
Location: Rocky 209

Talk title: "Fiction without Mimesis: a Comparative Philosophy of Fiction"
Description: "Is “fiction” a transhistorical and transcultural concept? Currie (2014) says yes.  In this talk, I argue that an imagination or pretense-based theory of fiction won’t account for classical Chinese conceptions of fiction, and more generally, that we ought to be skeptical of a universal notion of fiction because fiction is a concept that responds to a philosophical culture’s given background framework. Observing how classical Chinese (Daoist) metaphysics affected Chinese theories (and practice) of fiction (xiaoshuo), for instance, shows us how considerations other than imagination, make-believe, or mimesis can be the basis of a concept of fiction. More broadly, the comparative approach to fiction shows what the existing assumptions of analytic philosophy of fiction had been, and how it might reconceptualize its aims and methods."

Funded by the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy, which is an endowment established in 1996 to help support the study of philosophy at Dartmouth College. For more information on Philosophy's Sapientia Lecture Series, please visit this link.