In recent decades, speech act theorists began analyzing discourses in order to describe the logic that governs the use and understanding of language in the context of interlocutions. This paper is in the wake of those studies. It questions the fruitfulness of the notion of speech acts in literary pragmatics, analyzes some literary genres and proposes a discourse typology containing eight generic categories that reflect the possible links between factual and fictional discourses. In doing so, it offers a response to a question raised many years ago by a literary theorist that is directed to speech act theorists.
