Abstract
This chapter introduces the topic of the book: causation within, or according to, stories, and my intention to explore and defend George Saunders’ claim that the successful deployment of such causation makes fiction better. In addition, this chapter tries to make sense of the notion of literary merit. If no stories are better than any others, there is no point writing about what makes stories better. I explore several different accounts of literary merit and argue that some of these are false, and the ones that remain provide a sensible basis for exploring the question of whether and how and why causation makes fiction better.
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Notes
- 1.
I use the term “causation” rather than Saunders’ “causality” because it seems more natural to my philosopher’s ear.
- 2.
In what follows I shall sometimes shorten this to the phrase “the more causation the better.”
- 3.
See Zangwill (2023) for more discussion of aesthetic or literary merit.
References
Austen, Jane. 1972. Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin Books.
Forster, E.M. 2005. Aspects of the Novel. London: Penguin Classics, New Edition.
Hunt, Brendan, Joe Kelly, Bill Lawrence, and Jason Sudeikis. 2021. Ted Lasso. Season two. Episode 12. Apple TV+.
Saunders, George. 2021. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. New York City: Random House.
Thompson, Kristin. 1999. Storytelling in the New Hollywood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
Tolstoy, Leo. 2021. Master and Man. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. New York: Random House.
Zangwill, Nick. 2023. Aesthetic Judgment. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/aesthetic-judgment/.
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Howard-Snyder, F. (2024). Cause and Effect in Fiction: An Introduction. In: Cause and Effect in Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52712-8_1
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