Novel Worlds (original) (raw)
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Dialectics of Space and Place across Virtual and Corporeal Topographies, ed. June Jordaan, Carl Haddrell and Christine Alegria, Oxford 2016, pp. 151-164
"In herein paper I shall argue, whether Umberto Eco’s definition of allotopia (Il mondi della fantascienza, 1984) as another, alternate but still “more real than the real one” world should not be revised in the light of cognitive narratology (VR, immersion and storyworlds in Marie-Laure Ryan 1991, Hermann 2002), constructivism (‘reduction of complexity’ in Luhmann 1984), psychonarratology (immersion in Nell 1988, Gerrig 1993) and topography of literature. Following Bernhard Waldenfels’ (1997, 2006) notes on the nature of otherworldliness and its liaisons with what I call ‘xenotopography’, I shall examine whether the typically fantastic trichotomic model of world (empirical world → symbolical gate → counterempirical world) is not nowadays being replaced with pre-established, immersive and imaginative storyworld (purum figmentum). Consequently, I shall claim that the philosophical premises of allotopia and world-building alike are comprising the significant shift between 20th and 21st century prose which manifests in the tendency to create a storyworld prior to the storyline—a ‘matrix for all possible narratives’ (Dukaj 2010). Thus, allotopia will have become a perfect term for a multitude of topographico-literary tendencies, just to mention world-building think-tanks in nearly every video game studio or fictional encyclopaedias, thoroughly describing geography, topography, cartography and chronography (cf. Gavriel Rosenveld’s term of allohistory) of a given storyworld, like for instance the Wookiepaedia for Star Wars franchise or K. W. Fonstad’s The Atlas of Middle-Earth for the preconceived world of J. R. R. Tolkien’s. The utterance of allotopian encyclopaedias in the coherent “heterocosm of reference’ (Hutcheon 1987) will be exemplified in Frank Herbert’s Dune, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and Jacek Dukaj’s Inne Pieśni (‘Other Poems’)—novels peculiarly difficult to classify using typical nomenclature (they represent neither fantasy, nor SF, nor even a postmodern or magical realist novel). Moreover, as this prose is adhering the concept of ortsgebunden (Hausherr 1970)—i. e. the ‘place bound nature of literary forms’—by modelling spatial and spatio-temporal heterotopian frontiers within the allotopian storyworld, it allows to confront different ethnoses, places, or even lesser worlds—but not any more fairy-tale-bound empirical world which bestows upon a fantastic venturer the promising (though illusory) law to return."
World literature and the creation of literary worlds
Neohelicon, 2011
Based on the author’s work as general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, the essay develops an approach to world literature centered on world creation. The creation of literary worlds can be understood within the framework of possible worlds theory as developed by Thomas Pavel, Lubomir Dolezel and others. Taking its point of departure from possible worlds theory, the essay then focuses on specific genres that foreground the capacity of literature to create whole worlds, including world creation myths and science fiction. Three terms are used to analyze this body of literature: refer- ence; scale; and model. While the category of reference accounts for the status of the worlds to be found within literary works, scale and model capture the particular challenges world creation literature faces.
Primerjalna književnost
With the help of Peirce and Cassirer, this article embeds storyworld theory in a broader phenomenology of narrative imagination. A first step is the semiotic description of narrative imagination; storyworld elements come about through the laws that Peirce attributes to all semiotic processes (section 1). Besides, Peirce’s insights are used to show that those elements significantly differ according to their phenomenological or epistemological nature. From this description of semiotic processes, a matrix of nine different signs will be derived (section 2) that correspond to nine distinct operations of imagination. The hypothesis is that it suffices to attribute a distinct function to each of the nine signs to adequately describe the experience of a storyworld.
“All this little affair with ‘being’ is over:” Metaphysical Crisis in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
The present thesis sets out to follow three different problems in the metaphysics of Virginia Woolf’s late novel The Waves and contrast them with the theories of three thinkers – Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Jacques Derrida. First chapter discusses Woolf’s approach to subjectivity. It is shown that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s method establishing subjectivity as a by-product of a machinic assemblage is particularly fruitful in reading the characters in the first four chapters where their bodies and their “subjectivities” form in diverse ways. D&G comment on the waves of the lyrical passages as an abstract machine of which the character-assemblages are actualizations. They do not, however, comment on the territorialising function of sunlight which seems to be equally important and therefore needs to be analysed. This function corresponds with the ever growing oedipalisation of the characters which finds its summit in the exitus chapter and transforms a deterritorialised rhizome into a reterritorialized (or oedipalised) signifying system. The second chapter discusses how the functioning of the territorial machine of the sun reduces the rhizome into a centralised system whose centre can be understood through the prism of Derrida’s theory of structure as a play of supplementation. It posits Percival as this (non)centre of the signifying structure. The centre needs to be recognized as a supplementary sign that limits the infinite play of the structure. Percival’s status is confirmed in three different ways – he is a myth that cannot be the arché, he is a supplementary sign, and the transcendental illusion of his presence must be affirmed. Percival’s death induces different reactions in the three characters that narrate it. The reactions of Rhoda, Bernard and Neville are discussed along with Louis non-reaction. In Chapter III, the signs and the style of The Waves are analysed. A classification of signs devised by Deleuze is applied to the novel showing that all three basic types – worldly signs, signs of love, and sensuous signs can be found. In order to be able to explicate the fourth type, the signs of art, an apprenticeship has to be taken. Bernard undergoes this apprenticeship throughout the novel with more and less success but finishes it only in the last chapter. The signs of art are thought by Woolf perhaps in a slightly more radical way than Deleuze. Bernard’s final step, when the sun sets and the territorial machine stops working, is to take the line of flight towards deterritorialisation. He loses his self which enables him to see the world in its essence as absolute difference. This, however, only works because Bernard’s functioning as a character assemblage represents the production of the literary machine at the same time. He is therefore a part of the essence, the superior Viewpoint that provides different perspectives on objects. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the style of the novel and its relation to rhythm.
Notes Toward a Critical Approach to Worlds and World-Building
Imaginary worlds and how they are constructed are central to fiction. The term world-building, however, has been applied so broadly in scholarship that it has become ambiguous and difficult to use in critical discussions. Aiming to contribute to greater clarity in the critical use of the term, this article introduces the concept of critical world-building. This is distinguished from other types of world-building, such as that performed by an author or reader, mainly by the fact that a critic analyses a world through a combination of their sequential presentation, as complete world, and with critical interpretation and theoretical filters in place, applying all three perspectives simultaneously. Two possible approaches to critical world-building are presented, based on the functions of a world’s building-blocks and how to interpret those functions. The first approach focuses on a world’s “architecture” – its structural and aesthetic system of places – and the form, function, and meaning of those places. The second emphasises the dynamic interplay between building-blocks and their interconnections in a web of explicit, implied, and interpreted information about the world. The authors base their discussion on textual, secondary fantasy worlds but invite applications of critical world-building to other genres and media.
Toward a Critical Approach to Worlds and World-Building
2016
Imaginary worlds and how they are constructed are central to fiction. The term world-building, however, has been applied so broadly in scholarship that it has become ambiguous and difficult to use in critical discussions. Aiming to contribute to greater clarity in the critical use of the term, this article introduces the concept of critical world-building. This is distinguished from other types of world-building, such as that performed by an author or reader, mainly by the fact that a critic analyses a world through a combination of their sequential presentation, as complete world, and with critical interpretation and theoretical filters in place, applying all three perspectives simultaneously. Two possible approaches to critical world-building are presented, based on the functions of a world’s building-blocks and how to interpret those functions. The first approach focuses on a world’s “architecture” – its structural and aesthetic system of places – and the form, function, and mean...
Wordliness, Worlds, And Worlding of Literature
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2022
Based on Said's understanding of literature's worldliness, Hayot's concept of literary worlds, and Cheah's interpretation of worlding, the article-itself an example of "traveling theory" (Said)-proposes to treat world literature in a "secular" perspective, i.e., as an asymmetrical world-system that conditions a transcultural and translinguistic semiosis of literary worlds. The literary world-system, which arises from and is dependent on and responsive to the modern world-system of capitalism (see Warwick Research Collective) channels interliterary exchange in a way that is homologous to the economic inequality between the centers, which are capable of accumulating surplus value, and the peripheries, which enable the global dominance of the centers by providing the market, labor, and resources for the goods produced or distributed by the centers.