Meaning, reference and sense from the perspective of operating and interpreting the fictional world

The article traces distinct approaches to the concepts of 'meaning', 'reference' and 'sense' in twentieth-century literary theory and general semiotics. It offers an account of different concepts of 'mimesis', 'reference', and 'representation' from the point of view of fictional world making as well as from the point of reading a narrative. The article focuses on the tension between mimesis and diegesis, as coined by Plato and Aristotle, and it interprets concepts developed in recent times by scholars such as Jakobson, Quine, Ricoeur, Eco and de Man. Distinct sections of the article focus on the following: the referential function of proper names and the two contrasting approaches of Kripke and Linsky; the contrast between mimesis and diegesis as a functional reference to the world of experience in Ricoeur; the correspondence and truth conditions in Strawson and Davidson; the emphasis on coherence as a way of eliminating mimesis and reference in Eco's semiotics; the radical elimination of both the reference and the signified in deconstruction; the issue of textual re-presentation. The article attempts to illustrate the thesis that by accepting intentional, inside-of-the text produced concepts of meaning the reader and the critic would eventually loose not only all the ties to the actual world bu also the impulses for reading and interpreting.