A New Anatomy of Storyworlds

Description

The question of how narratives actually do the work of world-building transcends disciplines: from cosmology to philosophy, digital culture, popular culture, and literary theory. In A New Anatomy of Storyworlds, Marie-Laure Ryan investigates the narratological importance of the concept of world in its various manifestations. She uses a wide array of works—from Sokal’s hoax to Maus, from Saussure to Barthes, from Kafka to virtual reality—to interrogate key narratological concepts. By revisiting and redefining concepts such as narrator, plot, character, fictionality, mimesis, and diegesis, Ryan reexamines the major controversies that have enlivened narratology: Does narrative necessarily involve a narrator? Is the notion of implied author useful? Do texts that challenge our experience of the real world require a different narratology? Is the distinction between fictional and factual narratives gradual or binary? Ultimately, Ryan grounds narratology in the concept of world to propose an alternative to the rhetorical, feminist, unnatural, and cognitive approaches that currently dominate the field, thus broadening the frame through which we view story and world-building. Grounds narratology in the concept of world to propose an alternative to the rhetorical, feminist, unnatural, and cognitive approaches that currently dominate the field. “A New Anatomy of Storyworlds is a lucid, rich, and engaging study of fundamental narratological concepts, as well as controversial narratological elements. Ryan’s impressive work will appeal to scholars and enthusiasts beyond traditional narratology.” —Gerald J. Prince, author of Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar based in Colorado. She is the author of Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media and coauthor, with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu, of Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative. In standard literary criticism, the notion of world has long been used in an informal way to describe the distinctive character of an author’s creative activity, the inner vision that manifests itself either in an individual text or in the author’s total production. There is a world of Proust, a world of Homer, or a world of Jane Austen. But as long as literary theory remained focused on the signifier, at the expense of the signified, this informal use of world could not gel into a theoretical concept. From New Criticism to deconstruction, the “textualist” critical movements inspired by the linguistic turn of the fifties and sixties were too focused on language, on écriture, to pay attention to the concept of world, but if they had done so, they would have conceived world as an infinite sum of meanings that could not be paraphrased (a favorite battle cry of New Criticism was indeed “The heresy of paraphrase”), and that could not be separated from the text. It follows from these positions that the text is the only mode of access to its world. And because textualism is reluctant to isolate a narrative level of meaning from the global textual world, it implicitly adhered to a strict formula: one text—one world—one story.
After the linguistic turn came the narrative turn of the eighties, and narrative or story became prominent. One of the effects of the narrative turn was a shift of attention that, without ignoring the signifier, restored the importance of the signified. While stories are transmitted by discourse, which means by text, they remain inscribed in our minds long after the signifiers have vanished from memory. This means that story is a cognitive rather than a linguistic construct. The fact that stories can be summarized, adapted, and translated, and that they can be told by various media, emancipates them from language and makes them somewhat independent from the particular signs through which they are transmitted. The structuralist idea that Cinderella and a Chinese folk tale could be versions of the same story, which was heretical for textualism (Smith 1981), becomes very acceptable for a narratologist. Instead of one text, one world, one story, one could now have the possibility of many texts—one world—one story, or, if one assumes that every different version of a story creates a distinct world, many texts, one story, many worlds.

Narratologists

Introduction    Grounding Narratology in the Concept of World

Chapter 1        Truth: Discourse Types and Theories of Truth

Chapter 2        Fiction: The Possible Worlds Approach to Fiction and Its Rival Theories

Chapter 3        Narrator: Decomposing a Theoretical Primitive

Chapter 4        Characters: Textual, Philosophical, and “World” Approaches to Character Ontology

Chapter 5        Plot: Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design

Chapter 6        Mimesis and Diegesis: Complementing Each Other

Chapter 7        Parallel Worlds: Physics, Narrative, and the Multiverse

Chapter 8        Impossible Worlds: Dealing with Logical Contradiction

Chapter 9        Virtual Worlds: Narrative and VR Technology

Chapter 10      Transmedia Worlds: Industry Buzzword or New Narrative Experience?