On the very idea of the telling vs. showing distinction

Abstract

Abstract Current theoretical accounts of the telling vs. showing distinction suffer from the incompatibility of several very plausible intuitions. This leads to accounts which seem not even to be addressing the same phenomena. Going back to Lubbock and Genette, we uncover the intuitions in question, show that they are incompatible and propose a unificatory account, which takes a particular type of imagining on the part of reader to lie at the heart of the telling vs. showing distinction.