Call for Abstracts

Silly Questions about Fiction Workshop
November 18-19, 2024
Tilburg University
Tilburg, Netherlands

Submission deadline: September 30, 2024

When a book ends with the words “… and nobody lived to tell the tale”, how can a reader be reading about this tale? When a sound-boom operator clearly walks into the frame of a movie, how should a viewer reconcile this with this person being supposedly absent from the fictional world? When a glitch occurs in a videogame which unintentionally makes the human inhabitants of the gameworld fly like birds, is a player supposed to imagine them as flying people?

Within philosophy of fiction, questions like these have been called silly questions, because elaborating on them somehow seems inappropriate, distracting us from the real qualities and purposes of a work of fiction (cf. Walton 1990, 237; Currie 2010, 59). Yet silly questions have both aesthetic and philosophical appeal. Asking them is fun! And philosophers have found ways to make use of them, e.g. when defining fiction, analyzing our experiences of fiction, or discussing the authority of fiction creators. In this way, maybe they aren’t so silly after all.

This workshop brings together researchers to further explore the value of asking so-called “silly questions” about fiction. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Definitions of silly questions (and what makes them particularly “silly”)
• The ways in which silly questions can(not) be answered
• Possible ways to distinguish good/valuable silly questions from bad/useless ones
• Connections between silly questions and debates in aesthetics (e.g. on how to define fiction, fictional incompleteness, the puzzle of imaginative resistance, the paradox of fiction) or metaphysics (e.g. on the ontology of fictional particulars)
• Works of fiction that deliberately raise silly questions about their own content
• Silly questions and their relation to fictional genres
• The connection between fan-fiction and unanswerable questions about fiction
• Asking silly questions as a form of ‘wrong’, unconventional, comical, or transgressive fiction appreciation.

We invite abstracts of around 400 words for 30-minute presentations (with 15-minute Q&A). Abstracts should be prepared for blind review and sent to n.vandemosselaer [AT] tilburguniversity.edu by 23:59, 30 September 2024. Accepted papers will be informed by 4 October.

This two-day workshop takes place on the 18th and 19th of November at Tilburg University (the Netherlands), organized by Nele Van de Mosselaer and Nathan Wildman (N.W.Wildman@TILBURGUNIVERSITY.EDU).