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Notes
The articles included in this collection of papers comprise a selection of extended versions of contributions presented at the workshop “From One World to Another: Topics in Transworld Travel” organised as part of ICLA XIXth World Congress, Seoul, South Korea, 19–20 Aug 2010.
The list of possible worlds theorists in literary studies is evidently longer. Here we will settle for citing those who form the common theoretical horizon of the contributors to this cluster of articles.
For an examination of their contribution and their divergences concerning the application of the theory of possible worlds to literature, see the appraisal and the collection of contributions in Lavocat (2010).
As highlighted by Ruth Ronen (1994), mathematicians, philosophers and theorists of literature do not talk about the same thing when they speak of "possible worlds". Indeed, a number of fictional states of affairs are neither "complete" nor "consistent" (according to Kripke's logical model, a possible world is a combination of propositions that are "consistent" (they do not contradict each other) and complete (all the propositions it consists of are either true or false)). See also Ronen’s contribution to Mihailescu’s and Hamarneh’s still very useful collection of articles dedicated to the work of Doležel, Fiction Updated (1996).
See also, on the same theme, another interdisciplinary collaboration of Aurélien Barrau et al. (2010).
This term designates works which contain several worlds: several variants of the same story (for example in Melinda and Melinda, by Woody Allen in 2004) or ontologically different worlds (The Purple Rose of Cairo from 1987 is the paradigmatic example of this).
Naturally, we must distinguish between the various cultural contexts, and the chosen or constrained character of this phenomenon and experience.
See Herman and Vervaeck (2005, pp. 151–152, 159). Many tenets of possible worlds theory have been appropriated by so-called postclassical or cognitive narratology. See, for instance, David Herman (2002, pp. 17–18) understanding of fictional worlds as types of mental models that readers make to support their narrative understanding, or Herman (2002, pp. 325–326) redescription of focalization “as the narrative transcription of attitudes of seeing, believing, and speculating, and so forth” anchored in “particular models of the way the world is”.
Doležel (2010) distinguishes between fictional and nonfictional narratives on the basis of the different structural and semantic properties of their narrative worlds. In contrast, in their review of Doležel’s recent important contribution to the theory of fiction, Tyynelä and De Mey (2012, pp. 277–279) argue that possible worlds semantics may prove to be more helpful in explaining the heuristic and methodological differences between the historians’ and the novelists’ use of possible worlds (i.e. the heuristic rules of creating historically weighed causal explanations vs. constructing fictional worlds) rather than the properties of fictional and nonfictional narrative worlds.
See also Mikkonen (2007).
Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1999) and Olivier Caïra (2011) are notable exceptions in this respect. Likewise, some philosophers of aesthetics such as Gregory Currie (The Nature of Fiction, 1990; Narratives and Narrators 2010) have discussed fictionality both in literature and film. In film studies, see for instance Edward Branigan’s definition of fiction as “partially determined reference” at the end of his Narrative Comprehension and Film (1992).
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Lavocat, F., Mikkonen, K. Foreword: From one world to another: topics in transworld travel. Neohelicon 40, 399–404 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0209-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-013-0209-6