On Morals, Fictions, and Genres.

Abstract

As audiences, we interact with fictions in many ways: we evaluate their artistic worth, we imagine the scenarios that they describe, we emotionally respond to the characters in them, and we draw from them lessons that apply to our lives. As theorists, we want explanations of our interactions with fictions to have two qualities. We want explanations to be specific enough to acknowledge the diversity of fictions, to attend to the differences amongst them, and to account for their peculiarities. We also want explanations to be general enough to extrapolate from individual works, to illuminate interesting patterns, and to endow us with theoretical understanding. Genre explanations have both specificity and generality. As sensible groupings of fictions, genres mark relevant boundaries in the landscape of diverse fictions.

My dissertation argues that genre is central to explaining phenomena that arise from our interactions with fictions. Chapter 1 introduces and addresses two intuitive challenges to genre explanations that question their robustness and informativeness. Chapter 2 brings out genre's role in explaining imaginative resistance. Imaginative resistance occurs when certain propositions, such as morally-disagreeable claims, are presented in fictions and people resist imagining them and accepting them as true in the fiction. Genre gives us an understanding of why certain propositions evoke imaginative resistance when they are presented in some fictions but do not evoke imaginative resistance when they are presented in other fictions. Chapter 3 uses methods of cognitive science to empirically vindicate the theoretical account developed in the previous chapter. Since genre is low in psychological salience, its role in generating imaginative resistance may be more readily and persuasively demonstrated by empirical means. Chapter 4 brings out genre's role in explaining moral persuasion. Genre gives us an understanding of how different fictions educate or corrupt us in different ways.