The Edges of Fiction

What distinguishes fiction from ordinary experience is not a lack of reality but a surfeit of rationality – this was the thesis of Aristotle’s Poetics.  The rationality of fiction is that appearances are inverted.  Fiction overturns the ordinary course of events that occur one after the other, aiming to show how the unexpected arises, happiness transforms into unhappiness and ignorance into knowledge.  In the modern age, argues Rancière, this fictional rationality was developed in