Fiction Analysis

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

In fiction analysis cases, the fictional text is treated as a cultural artifact. The cultural artifact is understood as an effect of a given society that acts to mirror and emphasize variously chosen sets of enacted relations and phenomena of that society as situated in a distinct time and place.

Thus, the fictional text is an artifact that embodies a particular set of norms and patterns that are relevant to a given phenomenon or society. The treatment of fiction as “data” offers an opportunity to examine text(s) that both contain and are products of their social context. Fiction analysis is a way of taking cultural artifacts, steeped in the richness of the social context(s) that allowed for their creation, and then accepting the veracity of using such artifacts as data for analysis.

Fiction analysis is closely connected with ideas concerning history. We might usefully ask, as does Ann Rigney, why we see novels as unreliable due to the fact that creative writers are less constrained by their imaginative capacity than professional historians. Does the use of archival research by such historians render an account more revealing to us, or is it simply more authoritative? Postmodern historian Hayden White has questioned the assumed authority of a “historical account” by suggesting the many similarities in the craft of “fiction” and in “history.” Though White does not deny that historians draw on historical traces to “do” history, he highlights the many parallels of historians and writers of fiction, including their interest-driven hand in selecting the events they are to describe, ordering those events, and attaching meaning to those events. Perhaps the example of fictional historians such as John Demos, who makes use of historical fiction to provide for an “inner feel” of a period, offers us some reassurance of the value of fiction as a source of data for case studies.

The resonance that we may feel in experiencing the reading of a text is important, indeed valuable. Being that fiction is an aesthetic object, our reading experience transcends simple fact gathering. Thus the complexity of interacting experientially with characters and context in fiction offers a nuanced way of revealing both how subjects experience their situation and likewise how we as researchers experience their lives. In this respect, the addition of the researcher into both the data and the analysis of a case is particularly nuanced.

Whether or not the particular fiction is specifically described as historical fiction or not is of no particular matter. Fiction is written by authors who are shaped by (through) their social context and we as readers and researchers are as well. Our aesthetic experience of reading such fiction therefore brings into light not only the various social contextual factors at work in both the creation and consumption of the fiction but also in our reaction to experiencing the similarity or differences in such social contexts.

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