Speculation and fiction: introduction

Bhattacharya, S. and Chattopadhyay, A. (2015) Speculation and fiction: introduction. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 2(1), pp. 1-24.

Abstract

As students of literature, one of the most frequent questions we encounter is: how does one write anything? What are the factors responsible for writing fiction? Does fiction have its autonomous qualities? Put in a slightly different way: what is thought or how is thought put into fiction? Broadly speaking, the study into the domain of thought is speculation. The Oxford English dictionary defines “speculation” this way: “the forming of a theory or conjecture without firm evidence.”1 Speculation then is a field of thinking thought, conjecture, or hypothesis which seeks for evidence to become “fact” or “practice.” In such argument, the foundational aspect of all philosophy appears to be speculation. This won’t be an overstatement if we endeavour to trace the genealogy and use of the term in ancient Indian philosophy to the Greco-Roman world, or in the mediaeval scholastic philosophy in Europe.2 From the term’s rooted traditional philosophical basis to a particular meaning-making in genre fiction, there have been many developments but one aspect has been relatively unchanged: the question of conjecture. Speculative fiction does not have a rigid definition and is putatively understood to be an amalgam of many genres, forms, thoughts, or techniques. It is also about a world which is not necessarily the existent but in most cases the “material-possible”: the conjectural. Fiction in that analysis appears to be the medium through which the conjectural element of speculation is given a concrete material body. But fiction is not an end product only, the printed book or the text in this case, but also a world of ideas, thoughts, and imagination. In that sense, there is fiction already always within the “genre” of speculation. These are some of the interrelated but not always easily articulable aspects that we wanted to engage with in this volume, “Speculation and Fiction.”

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Bhattacharya, Dr Sourit
• Authors: Bhattacharya, S., and Chattopadhyay, A.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Journal Name: Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry
• Publisher: Sanglap
• ISSN: 2349-8064
• ISSN (Online): 2349-8064
• Published Online: 31 July 2015
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2015 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry 2(1): 1-24
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License