Postmodern Perspective
During the rise of the postmodern novel, some critics suggested that truth or significance lies beyond verisimilitude and that only by complete non-discursive freedom to encounter a novel could meaning truly be discovered. Verisimilitude, they argued, was not the first aspect of the text a reader experiences. The reader instead first tries to observe if the novel works as an intelligible narrative. The lens of verisimilitude is applied only after the reader establishes if the novel makes sense or not.
The reader can understand the novel as art but not necessarily as a cultural construction. The novel should challenge the construction of reality. In this sense, it was possible for art to precede reality. Reality had to catch up to the text rather than text staying present to reality. A boundary existed establishing that text does not belong to a current time or situation. In the postmodern context, verisimilitude was less of a concern for the novelist according to some critics.
Read more about this topic: Verisimilitude (literature)
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