Fictional Realities

Fictional Realities

Author: J. J. A. Mooij

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 9027222185

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This book is a study of the role of the imagination. It focuses on the imaginative use of language in literature (poetry and narrative prose); but it also touches on some more comprehensive issues, for the questions it discusses are questions regarding the relationship between mind, reality and unreality. The first two chapters survey the thinking about the imagination in the history of philosophy. The main trends and the main problems are discussed, particularly in respect of the (positive or negative) evaluation of imagination. The subsequent chapters investigate the role of the imagination from a closer point of view. How is it that imagination appears in literary art? Central topics of discussion are the nature of narrativity, of fictional discourse and fictional objects, of realistic fiction, of symbolism and metaphor. Moreover, the similarities (both real and imagined) between literature and the other arts are explored. In all chapters attention is paid to the problem of the value of art and literary imagination. The last chapter addresses this issue head-on. In particular, it attempts to define the value of literature in relation to science.


Fictional Realities

Fictional Realities

Author: Jan Johann Albinn Mooij

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9781556194290

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This work is a study of the role of the imagination. It focuses on the imaginative use of language in literature (poetry and narrative prose) and also touches on some more comprehensive issues, for the questions regarding the relationship between mind, reality and unreality. The first two chapters survey thinking about the imagination in the history of philosophy. The main trends and the main problems are discussed, particularly in respect of the (positive or negative) evaluation of imagination. The subsequent chapters investigate the role of the imagination more closely. discussion are the nature of narrativity, of fictional discourse and fictional objects, of realistic fiction, of symbolism and metaphor. The similarities, both real and imagined, between literature and the other arts are explored. In all chapters attention is paid to the problem of the value of art and literary imagination. The last chapter addresses this issue head-on. In particular, it attempts to define the value of literature in relation to science.


Fictional Realities / Real Fictions. Contemporary Theatre in Search of a New Mimetic Paradigm

Fictional Realities / Real Fictions. Contemporary Theatre in Search of a New Mimetic Paradigm

Author: Mateusz Borowski

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-03-26

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 1443807184

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The collection of essays Fictional Realities / Real Fictions. Contemporary Theatre in Search of a New Mimetic Paradigm tackles the problem of fictionality and reality in contemporary theatre practice and playwriting. It approaches this hotly debated issue in a larger context of the theories of theatrical and dramatic mimesis. The volume provides an answer to the most recent developments in performative arts, such as the widespread use of new media technologies, the popularity of site specific productions, and the flourishing of various post-dramatic forms of expression. The phenomena scrutinized in this collection call into question the basic dichotomy between the fictional and the real on which the theory and practice of the Western theatre has been based right from its inception. However, due to their extremely heterogeneous character, they pose a considerable problem for researchers and teachers, who still do not find a widely applicable methodology for the analysis of contemporary performances and texts for the theatre. Fictional Realities / Real Fictions sets the discussion of the onset of new mimetic paradigm in three interrelated contexts: the new perceptual patterns forged by contemporary theatre, the use of media on stage, and the strategies of today’s political theatre. The case studies presented here, in spite of their thematic diversity, are subordinated to a single theoretical framework. Thus they turn out extremely useful both for the scholars investigating the problems of contemporary theatre, and students of theatre and drama. Fictional Realities / Real Fictions offers them a rigid methodological scaffolding, supported by a number of illustrative examples from a variety of cultural context and theatre traditions, which gives them an opportunity to extrapolate from the main argument of the volume to their own research.


Fictional Discourse

Fictional Discourse

Author: Stefano Predelli

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020-02-05

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0198854129

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Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics combines the insight of linguistic and philosophical semantics with the study of fictional language. Its central idea is familiar to anyone exposed to the ways of narrative fiction, namely the notion of a fictional teller. Starting with premises having to do with fictional names such as 'Holmes' or 'Emma', Stefano Predelli develops Radical Fictionalism, a theory that is subsequently applied to central themes in the analysis of fiction. Among other things, he discusses the distinction between storyworlds and narrative peripheries, the relationships between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, narrative time, unreliability, and closure. The final chapters extend Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse, as Predelli introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters.


Experiencing Fictional Worlds

Experiencing Fictional Worlds

Author: Benedict Neurohr

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2019-02-15

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9027263035

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Experiencing Fictional Worlds is not only the title of this book, but a challenge to reveal exactly what makes the “experience” of literature. This volume presents contributions drawing upon a range of theories and frameworks based on the text-as-world metaphor. This text-world approach is fruitfully applied to a wide variety of text types, from poetry to genre-specific prose to children’s story-books. This book investigates how fictional worlds are built and updated, how context affects the conceptualisation of text-worlds, and how emotions are elicited in these processes. The diverse analyses of this volume apply and develop approaches such as Text World Theory, reader-response studies, and pedagogical stylistics, among other broader cognitive and linguistic frameworks. Experiencing Fictional Worlds aligns with other cutting-edge research on language conceptualisation in fields including cognitive linguistics, stylistics, narratology, and literary criticism. This volume will be relevant to anyone with interests in language and literature.


Impossibility Fiction

Impossibility Fiction

Author: Derek Littlewood

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9789042000322

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Impossibility fiction is an 'intergenre' that has recently been the resort of many writers searching for new ways of understanding and expressing the real world of the imagination, making use of fantasy, alternative history and science fiction. Coping with ideas that are both impossible and realistically constructed is the ultimate contemporary challenge of our technology. The chapters of this book move towards establishing appropriate readings that allow contemporary readers to negotiate unreality, a skill that the end of the millennium is making inevitably necessary. Such strategies have long been the preserve of literary and cultural study, and here a number of well-regarded scholars and some new to the field make their contribution to an area that has become increasingly important in recent years. From Mary Shelley to Philip K. Dick, Iain M. Banks to J.G. Ballard, taking in African-American science fiction, Jurassic Park, and Kurt Vonnegut, and exploring issues of alternative history and ideology, feminism, the holocaust, characterisation, and impossible geography, this collection is an important source-book for all those interested in the literature, culture and philosophy of realistic impossible worlds.


Fictional Space in the Modernist and Post-modernist American Novel

Fictional Space in the Modernist and Post-modernist American Novel

Author: Carl Darryl Malmgren

Publisher: Bucknell University Press

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780838750674

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Fictional space is the imaginal expanse of field created by fictional discourse; a space which, through ultimately self-referential and self-validating, necessarily exists in ascertainable relation to the real world outside the text. After defining his theoretical framework the author applies it to American fiction of the twentieth century.


How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Enhanced Edition)

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Enhanced Edition)

Author: Charles Yu

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2010-09-07

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0307379884

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This enhanced eBook includes video, audio, photographic, and linked content, as well as a bonus short story. Hear TAMMY talk. Learn the origins of Minor Universe 31. See the TM-31. Take a trip in it. Photos and illustrations appear as hyperlinked endnotes. Video and audio are embedded directly in text. *Video and audio may not play on all readers. Check your user manual for details. National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time. Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life. Wildly new and adventurous, Yu’s debut is certain to send shock waves of wonder through literary space–time.


Fictional Worlds

Fictional Worlds

Author: Thomas G. Pavel

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 1986

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 9780674299665

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Created worlds may resemble the actual world, but they can just as easily be deemed incomplete, precarious, or irrelevant. Why, then, does fiction continue to pull us in and, more interesting perhaps, how? In this beautiful book Pavel provides a poetics of the imaginary worlds of fiction, their properties, and their reason for being.


Fantasm and Fiction

Fantasm and Fiction

Author: Peter Schwenger

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 9780804734721

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This book analyzes the complex relationship between the fantasmal experience and the material text, reading a wide range of works that treat explicitly what is implicit in reading. Also, drawing on artists' books, drawings by authors, and films such as Prospero's Books, the author illuminates the process of textual visualization.