Marie-Laure Ryan
The metaphor of world to designate what is presented to the imagination by a narrative text has been informally used in literary theory and narratology for a very long time. No less time-honored is the association of narrative fiction with the domain of the possible: in the Poetics, Aristotle contrasts the task of the historian, which is to describe what is, to the task of the poet, which is to describe “what could be according to possibility and probability” (Poetics 9.2). When philosophers and logicians developed possible worlds (PW) theory, they established a connection between worldness and possibility that held great promise for scholars interested in the narrative experience, despite the differences in perspective and goals between philosophers and narratologists: the former conceive possible worlds as tools to solve problems in modal logic, while the latter view them as constructs of the imagination, as objects of aesthetic contemplation, and as conditions of narrative immersion. In this chapter I examine the relations between the worlds of PW theory and the notion of storyworld, which has recently gained traction as the designation of that which narrative texts, whatever their medium, display to the mind of the reader, spectator, or even player. First, I attempt to define the general properties of storyworlds. Then I explore the variety of storyworlds, comparing them on the basis of three variables: distance from the actual world, size, and ontological completeness. I conclude with the discussion of two texts that suggests different answers to the question of completeness.
Insofar as it can apply to both fictional and factual stories, the notion of storyworld is broader than the more traditional term fictional world. In the case of nonfiction, the storyworld as image of a world must be distinguished from the world being represented, since this world exists independently of any text; but in the case of fiction this distinction becomes void because the text creates its own world. Yet storyworlds have to fulfill more stringent conditions than fictional worlds because these conditions have to ensure narrativity. One can imagine a purely descriptive fictional world lacking a temporal dimension, but this world would not be a storyworld. The relation between storyworlds and fictional worlds is thus one of overlap: some storyworlds are not fictional, some fictional worlds are not storyworlds, but most imaginary worlds are both.
Building on the OED’s definition of worlds as “all that exists,” I regard storyworlds as totalities that encompass space, time, and individuated existents that undergo transformations as the result of events. Worlds can be thought of in two ways: as containers for entities that possess a physical mode of existence (events can be considered such entities because they affect solid objects and are anchored in time and space) and as networks of relations between these entities. By insisting on existents, events, and change, this conception of worlds links them to the basic conditions of narrativity, and it concurs with David Herman’s definition of storyworlds as “global mental representations enabling interpreters to frame inferences about situations, characters, and occurrences either explicitly mentioned or implied by a narrative text or discourse” (2009, 106).
As totalities that encompass both time and space, storyworlds solve a problem that has dogged narratology and text typology ever since Gérard Genette distinguished narration and description and regarded the latter as a “pause” in narration (1976, 6): the role of description in narrative texts. Text typologists (Chatman 1978; Virtanen 1992; Herman 2009) consider narration and description to be distinct text types: one is concerned with events that take place in time, the other with the properties of entities that exist in space. But while texts that represent the descriptive type on the macrolevel are rather rare (they are illustrated by academic papers in ethnography or human geography), description is widely found in the narrative text type. Text typologists (e.g., Virtanen 1992) contour this problem by claiming that text types can exist on both the macro- and the microlevels, but even if a text is considered narrative on the macrolevel, the descriptions of the microlevel constitute islands of nonnarrativity that need to be filtered out to get at the narrative meaning of the text. This is rather counterintuitive, since without descriptions readers could not form a mental image of characters and settings. Description constitutes, therefore, an integral dimension of narrativity. If narrative is conceived as the creation of a storyworld that extends in both space and time, rather than simply as the recounting of a sequence of events, then descriptions can be fully integrated into narrative meaning because they contribute as much to the image of this world as the report of events.
The concept of storyworld that I am proposing differs from other, more informal, and traditional uses of the term world in literary theory in several important ways. When critics speak of “the world of Proust” or “the world of Kafka,” they mean the totality of meanings associated with a given author. These large worlds can contain contradictions, since authors may defend different ideas during their career. Storyworlds, by contrast, relate to specific texts or groups of texts, and their links to individual authors are loose: authors may create several different storyworlds, as will be the case when science fiction writers produce different series of novels, while a storyworld can be developed by different authors, as will be the case in the phenomenon that Richard Saint-Gelais (2005, 2011) describes as “transfictionality.”
An important difference between storyworlds and the global vision of particular authors lies in the essentially concrete nature of storyworlds. While “the world of Proust” contains all the opinions and ideas that can be derived from À la recherche du temps perdu (as well as from Proust’s other texts), these aspects of meaning are not necessarily part of the storyworld of the novel because they can be messages indirectly conveyed by the author, who is not a member of the storyworld. It could be argued that even the voiced opinions of impersonal third-person narrators do not belong to storyworlds since these narrators are extradiegetic, which means located outside the storyworld.1 For an abstract idea to form a constitutive element of a storyworld it must correspond to the content of a mental event or of an act of communication actually performed by a member of this world. Storyworlds are not made of general statements such as “love hurts” but of particular events such as “Juliet thought that love hurts.”
Yet another common conception of worlds from which storyworlds must be distinguished is their association with spatial objects such as islands and planets. Narratives that represent travel between different worlds in the planetary or insular sense, such as Gulliver’s Travels and Star Wars, still present only one storyworld. Yet if one regards the beliefs, wishes, obligations, and dreams of characters as constituting private worlds (Ryan 1991), then storyworlds are not just worlds but entire universes, since they contain not only an actual world of narrative facts but a multitude of possible worlds created by the mental activity of characters.
In contrast to “textualist” literary doctrines that postulate an absolute dependency of worlds on texts (so that if one changes one word of the text, one also changes the world), the concept of storyworlds that I am proposing entertains loose relations with texts and narratives. Three cases are possible (Ryan 2015). (1) A narrative text may present several ontologically distinct worlds, for instance, when it describes multiple conflicting outcomes for the same situation, as in the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman and the film The Butterfly Effect. (2) A text may project a unified world that includes many different stories, as in the film Babel and the novel Cloud Atlas, which consist of several stories taking place in different places (Babel) or different times (Cloud Atlas) but connected by common objects. (3) Several texts may contribute to the building of the same world, as in the already mentioned phenomenon of transfictionality, to which I return later.
The notion of distance presupposes a point of reference. Through its opposition of one actual or real world to a multitude of nonactual possible worlds, PW theory suggests using the actual world (i.e., the world we inhabit and that determines our life experience) as the standard of comparison.2 The distance between our world and storyworlds can be measured by so-called ontological rules that specify what can be found and what cannot in a storyworld or in a type of storyworld. For instance, an ontological rule governing fairy tales states that the laws of nature that govern the actual world can be broken by magic and that fairy tales’ biological inventory can include species that cannot be found in reality, such as fairies, witches, and talking animals. Overall distance between worlds will depend on how many of the rules that describe one world are broken by the other. If we draw an analogy between ontological rules and what PW theory calls “accessibility relations,” the distance of a storyworld from the actual world is a function of the number of accessibility relations connecting the two worlds.3
The most general way to assess ontological distance relies on a story’s possibility of realization. A storyworld can entertain three basic types of relation to the actual world: it can be verified in it (this will happen in the case of accidentally true fiction, as well as in truthful factual narratives); it can be possible in it (realistic Victorian novels, fictionalized history, some science fiction); or it can be clearly impossible (fairy tales, the fantastic).4 The facts narrated in Madame Bovary, for instance, could have happened in the real world, because the storyworld of the novel only differs from the real world in that it adds a few individuals to its inventory while respecting its geography, history, and natural laws.
Fantastic stories may not be actualizable in the real world (though this is to some extent a matter of opinion: ghost stories could be credible for people who believe in the occult), but they remain imaginable and logically consistent. PW theory would regard their worlds as possible. We must therefore distinguish the pragmatically impossible (e.g., people being transformed into animals) from the logically impossible, which breaks the laws of noncontradiction (not p AND ~p) and of Excluded Middle (either p OR ~p). A distinction should further be made between logical impossibilities born out of interesting plot situations and “pure” logical impossibilities presented for their own sake. In the first category are the paradoxes inherent to time travel (cf. the grandfather paradox), ontological metalepses (fictionally fictional characters interacting with fictionally real ones), causes preceding their effects, or the replacement of the past by different events (Ryan 2009).5 While such narratives open logical holes in the fabric of storyworlds, their inconsistencies are limited to certain areas, and they do not contaminate the entire storyworld, despite the claim of logicians that when a single contradiction enters a system of propositions, anything can be inferred, and no world can be constructed. Readers process these texts according to what I call a “Swiss cheese strategy”: they close their eyes on the holes and process the rest of the text according to normal inference processes. This kind of contradiction thus remains compatible with world building and immersion. The second category, contradiction for its own sake, is exemplified by the folklore form of nonsense poetry, as well as by some postmodern texts, especially those of the French New Novel, a school whose explicit goal was to “free” the novel from the conventions of nineteenth-century narrative. As Lubomír Doležel writes about Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La maison de rendez-vous, this novel “constructs contradictions of different orders: (1) one and the same event is introduced in several conflicting versions; (2) a place (Hong Kong) is and is not the setting of the novel; (3) the same events are ordered in reversed temporal sequence (A precedes B and B precedes A); and (4) one and the same world entity recurs in several modes of existence—as a literary fictional fact, as a theater performance, as a sculpture, as a painting” (1998, 164). Such a systematic use of contradiction can have only one purpose, that of subverting the notion of storyworld, preventing immersion, and forcing—as Doležel concludes—a metafictional or metanarrative reading.
In a system that ranks texts according to the distance of their worlds from the actual world, texts that use contradiction for its own sake could be said to represent the most remote possible worlds, but this would mean that there are impossible possible worlds, an obvious oxymoron. For some scholars familiar with PW theory, the possibility of contradiction is reason enough to distinguish its possible worlds, which must respect the laws of logic, from fictional worlds, which do not. These scholars have no qualms about talking of impossible fictional worlds. Thus Doležel: “The writing of impossible worlds . . . cancels the entire world-making project. However, literature turns the ruin of its own enterprise into a new achievement: in designing impossible worlds, it poses a challenge to the imagination no less intriguing than squaring the circle” (1998, 165). Or Ruth Ronen: “With postmodernism, impossibilities, in the logical sense, have become a central poetic device, which shows that contradictions in themselves do not collapse the coherence of a fictional world” (1994, 55).6 The idea of impossible fictional worlds is particularly popular with the school known as unnatural narratology. In his book Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama, Jan Alber writes (citing Ronen 1994, 57): “Like Ronen . . . I refuse to view logical impossibilities in fictional worlds as violations of possible-worlds semantics. Rather I see them as ‘domains for exercising creative powers’ that we readers are invited to make sense of” (2016, 32). Alber’s claim that impossible fictional worlds still respect possible worlds semantics implies that this semantics embraces the oxymoron of impossible possible worlds, which I find highly doubtful. It is, however, unclear what PW theory does with representations that lie beyond the horizon of logically possible worlds. Are these worlds or nonworlds?
Even if we regard these representations as nonworlds, this does not exclude meaning and interpretation, because texts can convey ideas by simply exercising the purely literary or linguistic possibility of freely combining contradictory or incompatible terms. Yet while it is easy to write “square circle” or “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” (Chomsky’s famous example of a syntactically well-formed but semantically deviant sentence), it is quite another problem to build a plot and its supporting storyworld around such entities. Can one still speak of world when a text asks the imagination to perform acrobatics that stretch it to the breaking point? I simply cannot picture in my mind a situation where both p and –p obtain at the same time, no more than I can imagine a square circle or a flat sphere.7 Without denying their potential for meaningfulness, I regard texts that use contradictions for their own sake as refusing to construct a world. For a text to have a storyworld, it should be possible to build a mental representation compatible with the whole text (or, alternatively, a mental representation that builds a continuous solid area around the logical holes); but when a text openly asserts p and –p, all the imagination can do is contemplate a subworld where p, and then a subworld where –p, without reaching a synthesis. Thus when I try to form a mental picture of the nonsense rhyme “a young old man, sitting on a wooden stone, was reading a newspaper folded in his pocket in the light of a street lamp that had been turned off,” I imagine various permutations of the conflicting elements, for instance, a world where “an old man sitting on a stone was reading his newspaper” and another where “a young man sitting on a pile of wood had a newspaper folded in his pocket,” but I cannot conflate these versions into one world.8
The size of a storyworld is a function of the amount of information it gives about the world it purports to describe. A thousand-page narrative, a series of novels, or a transmedial franchise has a large storyworld, unless it is highly repetitive; a three-hundred-page stand-alone novel has a medium storyworld; and a short story, a joke, or a text of microfiction has a small storyworld. Here I would like to take a look at the problems raised by the two extremes: minimalist storyworlds and very large storyworlds created by multiple texts.
The genre of microfiction, which is currently gaining popularity, raises the question of the minimal conditions for a text to create a storyworld. Even if we assume that the worlds of PW theory are maximal worlds that assign a positive truth value to one of each pair of contradictory propositions, these worlds can be very small in terms of what exists in them. If we give a negative truth value to all the propositions that assert the existence of something, except for the proposition “there is a rock,” we will generate an ontologically complete possible world that consists of a rock and nothing else. (What if even this proposition is false? Can there be empty possible worlds?) Now consider the minimalist story proposed by E. M. Forster as an example of plot: “The king died, then the queen died of grief” ([1927] 1953, 82). If there is a possible world that contains only a rock, there should also be a possible world with just a king, a queen, and the two events that make up Forster’s example. But while this would be a possible world in a logical sense, it would not be a storyworld in a phenomenological or experiential sense because it lacks the ability to stimulate the imagination. We read Forster’s narratoid as a collection of propositions to which we assign a positive truth value, but we do not attempt to construct a world in which these propositions hold true. In other words, we do not relate emotionally to the grief of the queen; we do not picture her death in our mind; and we do not try any interpretation, such as asking if the king loved her as much as she loved him, because there is nothing beyond the text. This purely propositional mode of understanding is typical of the way we process plot summaries, as opposed to the texts that implement these plots. (And indeed, one could write a fascinating novel based on Forster’s sketch.) We read plot summaries to find out what a certain narrative is about and whether we may like it, but we do not become immersed in them, nor do we derive aesthetic pleasure from our reading.
While I would deny worldness in any sense but a strictly logical one to Forster’s example (or to the examples of minimal narrative proposed by Gerald Prince [1982], such as “John was rich, then he gambled, then he was poor”), I do not attribute this lack of worldness to the brevity of the text but, rather, to its failure to perform what Mary Louise Pratt (1977) calls a display of its content, that is to say, an invitation to the reader to engage with the reported events. It is certainly much more difficult for a short text than for a long one to create an immersive storyworld, since the reader is quickly expelled from it as the text comes to an end, but it is not impossible. Compare the Forster example to this famous example of flash fiction, attributed to Hemingway by a popular legend: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.”9 I am much more tempted to construct a world out of this minimalist narrative than out of the Forster example because it gives far greater room to my imagination. With the Forster text I do nothing more than process the information because there is no need to make any inferences, but with “baby shoes” I have to fill in gaps and construct past events to explain a puzzling situation. My filling of gaps leads me to imagine the plight of a young mother who lovingly prepared everything her baby would need but tragically lost the infant. This mother is so poor that she needs to sell the items that have become useless, or maybe the sight of the shoes is so painful for her that she has to get rid of them. Whether a text displays a storyworld or only asserts propositions is admittedly a subjective decision, since readers differ in their willingness to engage with certain types of content, but the decision rests on a dependable guideline: when a text creates a storyworld, we imagine that there is more to this world than what the text represents.
While the small semantic domains of microfiction raise the problem of the phenomenological difference between projecting a storyworld and simply asserting propositions, the large, expandable domains of transfictionality and transmedia storytelling raise the problem of the identity of storyworlds. Transfictionality is defined by Richard Saint-Gelais (2005) as the sharing of elements, mostly characters, but also imaginary locations, events, and entire fictional worlds, by two or more works of fiction. Transmedia storytelling, the much-talked-about phenomenon responsible for the creation of large commercial franchises such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings, is a combination of transfictionality and adaptation: like adaptation, it spreads narrative content across multiple media; though unlike adaptation, it usually involves more than two; and like transfictionality, it builds storyworlds through multiple texts. Henry Jenkins defines it in this way, though most of the big commercial franchises fail his definition because they exploit the success of a popular narrative originally conceived as monomedial through sequels, prequels, and adaptations, rather than deliberately distributing narrative content across many media: “Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story” (2007, n.p., emphasis original).
Whether it uses one or several media, transfictionality relies on a number of basic operations: (1) extension, which adds new stories to the fictional world while respecting the facts established in the original; (2) modification, which changes the plot of the original narrative, for instance, by giving it a different ending; and (3) transposition, which transports a plot into a different temporal or spatial setting, as, for instance, when the musical West Side Story sets the plot of Romeo and Juliet in the New York City of the 1950s.10 To this basic catalog of transfictional operations one could conceivably add two more: (4) mash-up, or crossover, an operation that allows characters imported from different narratives to coexist within the same storyworld, as when the heroes of different nineteenth-century novels meet each other in the novels of Jasper Fforde or in the comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. On the level of storyworld configuration, the mash-up operation allows generic storyworlds to be contaminated by foreign elements, as when the gentle aristocratic world of Jane Austen is invaded by creatures from the horror genre in the novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith. We could also add (5) embedding, an operation by which a storyworld exists in another storyworld as fiction rather than as part of reality. Thus, the characters in the TV series Futurama can watch The Simpsons on TV, and vice-versa.
Insofar as it maintains ontological boundaries, embedding can be considered a special case of expansion. A new show appears on the TV screen of the Simpson family, and they may talk about it, but the show does not acquire reality status, and it does not threaten the autonomy of the Simpson storyworld. Mash-up and crossovers, by contrast, create brand-new storyworlds through a process of hybridization: half of the world of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes from Jane Austen, the other half from the horror genre. If the mash-up is constructed as the migration of characters into a different storyworld where they must fight zombies, it becomes a case of transposition, especially since the plot remains roughly the same: Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth marry after a complicated courtship. This leaves us with only three basic transfictional operations: expansion, modification, and transposition.
While all three operations are found in postmodern fiction, as Doležel demonstrates (1998, 199–226), only the first, expansion, is acceptable for the fans of the transmedia franchises of popular culture because it is the only one that respects the integrity of the storyworld. With expansion, the names of characters refer to the same individuals, the facts established by the other texts are respected, and the storyworld established on the basis of the whole system is free of contradictions. The operation of modification, by contrast, creates contradictory versions that challenge the logical consistency of the storyworld; it is widely practiced in fan fiction, but fan fiction is not canonical. Modification can only be regarded as a legitimate way to build storyworlds if we adopt a broad imaginative conception of world rather than a narrow logical one. To fight contradiction, producers of large franchises create compilations of facts known as Bibles that authors of tie-ins are asked to respect, and to maintain control over the growth of storyworlds, they may declare some texts canonical and others noncanonical. When the Disney Company rebooted the Star Wars franchise, it excluded from the canon many tie-ins that the Lucas Company had accepted as world defining, thereby changing their ontological status from descriptions of the actual world of the system to descriptions of merely possible counterfactual worlds.11 As for transposition, it creates an entirely different storyworld, thereby conflicting with the main reason for the popularity of transmedia franchises: the loyalty of audiences to a given world and to its characters and their desire for more information about them.
When two texts are linked by relations of expansion, characters bearing the same name can be considered the same individual, since they present the same core of properties. In the case of modification, however, the same name can refer to characters with different personal histories. If one accepts Saul Kripke’s 1972 theory of proper names as rigid designators, which tells us that names refer to the same individual regardless of changes in their properties, these homonymous characters will be considered counterparts of each other in different possible worlds. The counterpart relation allows readers to submit these characters to what I have called “the principle of minimal departure” (Ryan 1991): construct them as close as possible to the characters of the original text, except for the changes imposed by the new text.12 Transposition presents a more complicated case because the corresponding characters may or may not have the same name. Maria in West Side Story is not literally Juliet, even though she suffers similar obstacles to the fulfillment of her love. In this case, the two characters are linked to each other by analogical rather than counterpart relations. But what if the characters in the transposed story have the same names as in the original? In Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible, a transposition of Pride and Prejudice to contemporary Cincinnati, we find characters named Jane, Elizabeth, Mary, Kitty, and Lydia Bennet, as well as a Fitzwilliam Darcy and a Chip Bingley. True to contemporary culture, the sisters are busy with texting, yoga, painting their nails, Paleo diet, and exercising, and the three youngest live at home, unable to achieve financial independence. Darcy is a rich doctor, and Bingley is the star of a reality TV show, Eligible, on which he must choose a bride from a pool of bachelorettes. Are these characters mere homonyms, or are they counterparts of the same individuals in different worlds? If the counterpart solution is chosen (and I do choose it), an interpretation suggested to the reader by strong similarities in both plot and personalities, the text will be processed as “what would the Bennet sisters do in contemporary culture?” (cf. the popular guideline “what would Jesus do?”); if it is not chosen, the sisters of Eligible would be merely typical millennials.13
When two or more texts are written by the same author, and when the setting and all the character names remain the same, the answer to the question of whether or not the texts refer to the same world is usually positive. But this answer is not automatic. The question of world and character identity has been recently raised by the 2015 publication of To Set a Watchman by Harper Lee, the author of the celebrated novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). The earlier novel describes the efforts of a white Alabama lawyer, Atticus Finch, to defend an African American man named Tom Robinson wrongly accused of assaulting a white woman. The whole story is narrated from the perspective of Atticus’s young daughter, Scout. Written before Mockingbird and initially rejected by publishers, Watchman is set some fifteen years after Mockingbird. The novel describes the visit of an adult Scout to her family in Alabama and her disagreement with the racial politics of her father, a lawyer also named Atticus Finch who has joined an association that defends segregation. The setting, Maycomb, Alabama, is identical, and so are the names of most characters. Many readers were disappointed to find out that the heroic Atticus of Mockingbird has turned into a racist in his old age. But given the fact that no mention is made of the Robinson trial in Watchman and that Lee completely reconceived the early manuscript when she wrote Mockingbird, can one automatically assume that the Mockingbird Atticus is the same person as the Watchman Atticus and that there is a continuous ideological evolution connecting the two? The textualist school would say that Harper Lee created a brand new storyworld when she rewrote Watchman and turned it into Mockingbird, so that the two Atticuses are really different persons; but the disappointment of readers demonstrates the strength of the tendency to imagine a large world encompassing both texts.
The question of ontological completeness has been one of the most controversial issues in the application of PW theory to storyworlds. For a world to be complete it must possess the property of maximality and excluded middle, which stipulates that for every contradictory pair of propositions, one must be true and another false in that world. Completeness is a property of the actual world and of the worlds of PW, since they represent alternative ways the real world might have been: it would be too far-fetched to imagine that a complete world could have been incomplete. But as Doležel observes, “It would take a text of infinite length to construct a complete fictional world. Finite texts, the only texts that humans are capable of producing, are bound to create incomplete worlds. For this reason, incompleteness is a universal extensional property of the fictional-world structuring” (1998, 169). This reasoning is supported by the famous controversy regarding the number of children of Lady Macbeth, first raised by Lionel Charles Knight in 1933, about which philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff writes, “We will never know how many children had Lady Macbeth. That is not because to know this would require knowledge beyond the capacity of human beings. It is because there is nothing of the sort to know” (1980, 133). The thesis of the incompleteness of fictional storyworlds presupposes a perspective external to these worlds and a sustained awareness of the textual origin of fictional creatures (what I call “textualism”) that inhibits make-believe and makes it difficult to explain immersion.
In addition to its incompatibility with immersion (who would care for fictional characters if they are not perceived as ontologically like us?), the idea of fictional incompleteness encounters difficulties when complete real-world entities, such as Paris and Napoleon, enter fictional storyworlds and interact with native characters. Three solutions to this problem are possible: (1) The inventory of the storyworld is split between complete and incomplete entities—a solution that conflicts with the sense of unity and homogeneity conveyed by realistic storyworlds. (2) Real-world entities become incomplete when they enter fictional worlds because they are ontologically recreated by the text. Ruth Ronen claims, for example, that the Paris of Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir loses its geography because none of the places of the real Paris are mentioned in the novel (1994, 128 ff.). This reduces the two Parises to mere homonyms and makes the proposition “Julien Sorel moved to a city on the Seine” either false or indeterminate in the world of the novel, a rather counterintuitive implication (3). Both native and imported entities are experienced by readers as complete, provided the text presents a sufficient degree of mimeticism to construct a storyworld.
The third interpretation is the one that I would like to defend, as I did in my 1991 work. In contrast to possibility 2, possibility 3 adopts the world-internal viewpoint of the readers who relocate themselves imaginatively into a storyworld rather than the external perspective typical of philosophers who look at fiction from the perspective of the real world and oppose a fictional mode of existence that encompasses all fictional entities to a real mode. Unless narrative texts practice the illusion-destroying self-reflectivity that we have come to expect from postmodernism, they present their characters as real people within the storyworld and not as textual constructs. While readers know that the storyworld would not exist without the text (or texts), they pretend that it has an autonomous existence and that the text represents it rather than creates it. This means that readers construct storyworlds and their characters as sharing the ontological status of the real world and of its inhabitants unless otherwise specified.14 If we imagined Emma Bovary and Lady Macbeth as presenting ontological gaps, they would differ from actual human beings in ways not mandated by the text. While we don’t know how many children Lady Macbeth had, and we will never know, we still regard her as somebody who had a determinate number of children. It’s just that the text does not specify this number. We consequently treat it as missing information, rather than as ontological gap. Similarly, we don’t know and we may never know how many children were born to the historical character of Cleopatra, but this does not make Cleopatra ontologically incomplete. Wolterstorff would probably object that in the case of Cleopatra this information may surface someday, while it will not in the case of Lady Macbeth, but this argument takes an external perspective on the world of Macbeth rather than adopting the attitude of make-believe that defines our experience of fiction (Currie 1990; Walton 1990).
Yet while most narratives present their storyworlds as complete, some fictions do indeed create worlds with ontological gaps. In contrast to the textualist position that regards all fictional storyworlds as incomplete, the difference between them being a matter of what Doležel calls their “saturation” (1998, 169–84), I want to argue for a qualitative difference between complete and incomplete storyworlds (if the latter can still be called storyworlds). I will take as example two dramatic texts, the seventeenth-century French tragedy Phèdre by Jean Racine, and Samuel Beckett’s twentieth-century play En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot. As a performance-centered type of narrative, which means as a spectacle, the theater depends heavily on what is shown onstage, but because its storyworld can include elements that exist beyond the stage, it provides a particularly good test of the difference between ontologically full and gappy worlds and characters. As Philip Auslander (2015) has argued, the theater oscillates between two poles: the mimetic pole of narrative and fictional representation and the antimimetic pole of pure performance. The spectacles of the mimetic pole present a classic ontology whose space and time extend beyond what is shown onstage, while the spectacles representing the pole of pure performance (such as nonnarrative modern dance) limit space and time to the “here” and “now” occupied by the bodies of the performers.
The plot of Phèdre can be summarized as follows: Phèdre is the wife of Thésée (Theseus), king of Trézène. She has fallen in love with Hippolyte, Thésée’s son from an earlier marriage. At the beginning of the play Thésée has been absent for six months. When the news of his death arrives, Phèdre confesses her passion to a horrified Hippolyte, who is in love with Aricie, a young woman he cannot marry because she comes from an enemy house. But the news of Thésée’s death is soon overturned, and he returns to Trézène. With the consent of Phèdre, Oenone, her nurse, tells Thésée that Hippolyte has tried to force himself on Phèdre. Furious, Thésée asks the god Neptune to take revenge on Hippolyte and banishes him from the kingdom. Soon after, Théramène, Hippolyte’s advisor, arrives with the news that Hippolyte has been killed by a sea monster. Full of remorse, Phèdre confesses her lie to Thésée and dies onstage after having taken poison.
Phèdre clearly represents the mimetic/narrative pole. Its world, as well as the world of all strongly mimetic forms of drama, can be divided into three circles: circle 1, the space-time of the action shown onstage; circle 2, the space-time of the action taking place offstage, such as narrated events; and circle 3, the space-time of the geographic and historical context in which the action takes place.15 In Phèdre the location of circle 1 is not a specific place, as a private room would be, but rather an abstract space, a pure thoroughfare where characters come and go freely without specific motivation. How else could one explain that in the same location Phèdre confesses her love to Hippolyte, Hippolyte confesses his love to Aricie, Oenone suggests to Phèdre to accuse Hippolyte of sexual advances, Thésée curses Hippolyte, and Phèdre comes to die? This abstract space is commonly conceived as “the antechamber of the palace,” but the stage directions only say “the action is in Trézène.”
The second circle, located beyond the stage, literally in the wings, is the realm of the diegetic mode of narration, as opposed to the mimetic mode of the stage action. As the seventeenth-century poet and critic Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux wrote, “Ce qu’on ne doit point voir qu’un récit nous l’expose” (let a narrative tell what cannot be shown) (L’art poétique, canto 3). The rules of classical French tragedy do not allow showing violent events onstage, but the death of Hippolyte away from the palace can be narrated in its most grisly details by Théramène. The events of this second circle fully respect the rules, which called for unity of place and time, since they take place between the beginning and the end of the stage action, and they are located in places sufficiently close to be reached within the prescribed time frame.
The third circle consists of the geography of Greece and of all the stories of Greek mythology. When a narrative mentions a real-world location, the principle of minimal departure (see note 10) tells us that its storyworld encompasses all of real-world geography. For instance, when Théramène mentions “the two seas separated by Corinth,” the spectator is entitled to assume that the storyworld of Phèdre encompasses not only Trézène on the Peloponnese but also Athens, Sparta, and all the islands of the Aegean Sea. This explains why the Larousse edition offers a map of ancient Greece as a “reading tool.” Racine’s text also includes numerous references to ancient Greek mythology. These narratives are not presented as fictions but as a historical past whose influence plays a crucial role in the plot. For instance, Hippolyte cannot inherit the throne of Thésée because he is the son of an Amazon, that is, of a stranger, and he cannot marry Aricie because her brothers once plotted to dethrone Thésée.
By filling the three circles of its actual world with existents, Phèdre verifies the principle stated above: when a text creates a (full) storyworld, we imagine that there is more to this world than the text represents (or shows onstage, in the case of drama). This principle does not hold for Godot, as we can see from its handling of the three circles. The first one contains everything that exists beyond doubt in the world of Godot. Scenic space is less abstract than in Phèdre; the stage directions describe it as “A country road. A tree. Evening” (1952/54, 7). There is also a rock, on which Estragon is sitting. While in Phèdre the dramatic action is entirely dependent on the dialogue, in Godot gestures are so prominent and so elaborately described by the stage directions that they turn the play into a pantomime. The dialogue, on the other hand, plays a marginal role in the dramatic progression because most of the time it means much more through its incoherence than through its actual content: one could imagine a teacher of creative writing asking students to rewrite the dialogue of Godot, aiming for the same absurdist effect, but it would be unthinkable to replace the dense, intricately wrought verses of Racine with the creations of amateurs.
As we have already seen, circle 2 consists of all the events relevant to the plot that take place outside the stage. In Godot this circle is as good as empty. In the first act Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot; in the second act they are still waiting, and one can imagine that they will wait forever, because Godot will never come. There is a semblance of external event when a young boy enters the stage with a message from Mr. Godot for Vladimir and Estragon, a message that informs them that Mr. Godot will not come that evening. This event is repeated in both acts (165, 345). It presupposes an act of communication between the boy and Godot in circle 2, an event that presupposes in turn the existence of Godot in this circle. But Godot’s existence becomes doubtful when, in act 2, the boy declares that he didn’t bring a message on the previous day, a day that spectators would normally associate with act 1. Was it another boy, is the boy lying, or does the world of Godot transgress the principle of noncontradiction? Whatever the answer, one cannot conclude that Godot exists in circle 2, because instead of giving a de re interpretation of the boy’s claim that he has a message from Godot, according to which there is an individual named Godot who gave a message to the boy, one can settle for a de dicto interpretation, according to which there is a boy who claims he has a message from somebody named Godot, but this claim could be false while the whole proposition remains true.
Another indication of the emptiness of circle 2 is the fact that a character named Pozzo can see in act 1 but is blind in act 2. Such a change of state would normally be caused by an event temporally located between act 1 and act 2, but the text does not allude to such an event. Nothing happens between act 1 and act 2, and the change is purely arbitrary. Though spectators normally expect that act 2 follows act 1 unless otherwise suggested, there is no reason to assume that time passes between the two acts.
Circle 3 in Godot is barely fuller than circle 2. While the world of Phèdre participates in a rich mythological tradition, a tradition that characters regard as history, the world of Godot is locked in an almost complete ontological isolation. A few real-world place-names are mentioned, for instance, the departments of Vaucluse, Seine, and Seine-et-Oise in the French version, but these toponyms are chosen for their sonorities and not for their geographical connotations: in the English version, also written by Beckett, Seine and Seine-et-Oise become Fordham and Clapham. I have mentioned above that when a fictional text mentions a real-world toponym, all of real-world geography becomes implicitly part of its world; but this principle does not operate in Godot: in this text, names are pure signifiers without referent.
Toward the end of the play (262 ff.), it turns out that space is limited to the space of the stage. Vladimir and Estragon feel threatened, and they try to escape, but they are unable to do so, because there is no elsewhere. Not only is the storyworld reduced to the area of the stage, it is itself a flat area comparable to the worldview traditionally (but wrongly) associated with medieval belief. When Pozzo and Lucky leave the stage a loud noise is heard: they fell from the edge of the world. The absence of space beyond the stage also explains the last lines: “Well, shall we go?” says Vladimir. “Let’s go,” answers Estragon (357); then the curtain falls. When there is nowhere to go, movement becomes impossible.
Not only is there no space that allows movement, there is no time that allows change.16 Vladimir and Estragon have always waited for Godot and will always do so. They already know each other at the beginning of the play, but the circumstances of their meeting do not exist, because they do not have personal biographies. They seem from time to time to have distinct personalities, but most of the time they are interchangeable, so that Vladimir’s lines could be given to Estragon and vice-versa without significant consequences. They do have a belief world (Godot exists, and they must wait for Godot), but beyond this belief one cannot say anything about them. They are not human beings but allegories. The principle of minimal departure, which tells us to imagine characters on the model of ontologically complete real-world people, does not apply to them.17
Phèdre clearly occupies what Auslander calls the mimetic/narrative pole, but Godot is more difficult to categorize: Should one place Beckett’s play halfway between the two poles, on the ground that it projects an embryo of storyworld, a world that maintains some substance despite its ontological gaps and that remains capable of immersing the spectator in the existential plight of the characters? Or should one locate the play near the pole of pure performance on the ground that its lack of a continuous time and space render narrative development impossible? For Vladimir and Estragon, there is a world that stretches beyond the stage, a world where Godot resides and whose time will perhaps stop when Godot arrives, but for the spectator who doubts the existence of Godot, there is nothing more than the spectacle on the stage and the dialogue of the characters, nothing more than the here and the now. The play thus rests on a conflict between the “objective” ontology of the world in which Vladimir and Estragon live, an ontology far remote from our life experience, and their private conception of this ontology, which retains the properties of a classic ontology. This conflict goes a long way toward explaining the poignant character of the play.
Can one still speak of storyworld in the case of Godot, or does the play illustrate the case of a fictional world that fails to develop into a storyworld? (Try summarizing the plot!) If we regard mimesis as essential to narrativity (pace the school of unnatural narrative, whose members claim that there are nonmimetic narratives [Alber et al. 2010]), and if we regard the type of mimesis that defines narrative as the representation of a world whose members have roughly the same reasons for acting as we have in the real world, then Godot fails this criterion. The gestures and talk of Vladimir and Estragon are so random, so absurd, that they cannot be said to implement “the implicit inferential logic of action guiding our real-world experience,” as Jean-Marie Schaeffer and Ioana Vultur (2004, 310) describe Paul Ricoeur’s conception of mimesis. Vladimir and Estragon perform a verbal and corporeal ballet closer to the gestures of the performers in an abstract dance spectacle than to the kind of strategic moves and occasionally irrational but always goal-oriented actions that we find in Phèdre. The closer a text to Auslander’s pole of antimimetic pure performance, the less of a storyworld it displays to the imagination.
The introduction of the concept of world, or storyworld, in narratology can be considered a paradigm shift with respect to the school of thought that I call textualism, a school represented by New Criticism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. Textualism is a theory of high culture and literary narrative. It privileges the signifier over the signified (cf. Barthes’s description of the ideal literary text as “galaxies of signifiers” [1974, 5]); it considers literary texts to be primarily about language, not about the kinds of issues that preoccupy human beings; it believes in the infinity, ineffability, and fundamental ambiguity of literary meaning; and it insists on a radical ontological distinction between the flesh-and-blood inhabitants of the real world and the language-made creatures of fiction, so that fictional characters are collections of semantic features rather than imaginary human beings. The storyworld approach, by contrast, applies to all narrative media and embraces both high and popular culture. Regarding texts as “blueprints for worldmaking” (Herman 2009, 195) it rests on the idea that storyworlds, though created by texts, are imagined as existing independently of the medium and as containing more than the text can describe. This idea has important theoretical consequences:
The notion of storyworld provides the surrounding environment required for immersion. Whatever name one gives to the experience of being totally absorbed in a story, of being present on the scene of the events, of feeling empathy for the characters, of eagerly awaiting to find out how the story ends, this experience cannot take place without the sense that the text projects a world that encompasses both characters and events.18
The notion of storyworld justifies the practice of transfictionality. If worlds are imagined as existing independently of texts, they escape the control of the original author, and they become expandable. The characters acquire a life of their own, and they can be placed in other circumstances than those described in the original text. And since PW theory tells us that “things could have been different from what they are,” it becomes feasible to create alternatives to established fictional worlds.
In language-based narrative, the notion of storyworld encourages a mode of reading based on imagining, visualizing, and mentally simulating the action, rather than on extracting the propositional content of sentences. In contrast to a strict focus on propositional content, these modes of experiencing narrative set no limits on what can be mentally contemplated.
Without a notion of storyworld, it would be difficult to justify fan behavior, such as drawing maps, compiling encyclopedias, constructing genealogies, writing fan fiction, and even dressing up as characters in a cosplay event. These behaviors demonstrate the strength of the need of audiences not only to immerse themselves in storyworlds but to share them with others and to participate in their creation.
The notion of storyworld does not reduce all fictions to a uniform model, because “worldness” can be realized to different degrees. The narrativity of a text is a function of its worldness, and its worldness is a function of its ability to build a mental representation that satisfies the three conditions discussed in this chapter: being logically consistent, large enough to stimulate the imagination, and experienced as complete.
1. This does not mean that the narrator’s opinions do not influence the reader’s construction of the storyworld; they certainly do, but they do it in the same way the soundtrack of a film, which is clearly extradiegetic, affects the spectator’s experience.
2. The distance of a nonactual possible world from the actual world can be measured, at least theoretically, in terms of the number of propositions whose value differs in each case, though this method does not distinguish important propositions (Napoleon was emperor of France) from rather trivial ones (Napoleon had brown eyes) and therefore cannot account for the fact that a world in which Napoleon is not emperor but does have brown eyes will generally be judged farther from the actual world than a world in which Napoleon has blue eyes but does become emperor, an event that has significant consequences for history.
3. See Ryan (1991, chap. 2) for a systematic exploration of accessibility relations.
4. To these three ontological categories, Doreen Maître (following Todorov’s personal definition of the fantastic) adds a fourth: storyworlds in which there is a hesitation, often unresolvable, between could-be-actual and could-never-be-actual events, as, for instance, when an event could be caused by either supernatural forces or strange manifestations of the laws of nature. (Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is widely regarded as an illustration of this category: the text does not assert the existence of supernatural beings, but strange events happen that can be regarded as either the hallucination of a governess or the work of ghosts.) However, Maître’s fourth category differs from the other three in that it is not ontological but epistemological. Her taxonomy rests, therefore, on mixed criteria.
5. The grandfather paradox concerns a time traveler who goes back into the past and kills his grandfather; consequently, he is not born and does not travel into the past; therefore, his grandfather is not killed, and the time traveler is born (etc. etc. in an infinite loop).
6. I assume that Ronen means coherence in a thematic or an aesthetic, not a logical, sense.
7. As for the circle famously squared by Sherlock Holmes, a favorite example of philosophers, it is not an impossible object but a procedure that has been geometrically proven to be impossible. According to Wikipedia, “It is the challenge of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge.” I don’t feel that a story in which Sherlock squares the circle would construct an impossible world: it would, rather, be a world that challenges Euclidean geometry or a world where Sherlock proves mathematicians to be wrong. Of course, the event could be taken as a metaphor of Sherlock’s incredible problem-solving ability, which would erase impossibility.
8. Users will differ in what they do with contradictions: some will be deeply bothered by them, some will just ignore them, some will accept the existence of impossible objects without trying to imagine them because the text tells them to do so; and Jan Alber has even suggested a mystical “Zen mode of reading” (2016, 54) by which contradictions will be seen as forming a harmonious whole.
9. According to Wikipedia, “The May 16, 1910 edition of the Spokane Press had an article titled ‘Tragedy of Baby’s Death is Revealed in Sale of Clothes.’ At that time, Hemingway would only have been aged ten, and years away from beginning his writing career” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_sale:_baby_shoes,_never_worn).
10. Doležel may have been the first to distinguish these three operations in his treatment of postmodern rewrites in Heterocosmica, but he uses “displacement” for what I refer to as modification (1998, 206–7). While popular in postmodernism, the phenomenon of transfictionality is much older. It goes back at least to the sequel to Don Quixote written by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda during Cervantes’s lifetime (expansion), to the 1681 alternative version of Shakespeare’s King Lear by Nahum Tate (modification), and to the multiple transpositions of the Robinson Crusoe saga in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (e.g., Swiss Family Robinson).
12. The principle normally works between the real world and fictional storyworlds, telling us to fill in gaps in the latter on the basis of our life experience unless otherwise specified by the text, but in the case of transfictionality it constructs a fictional storyworld as the closest possible to a preexisting fictional world.
13. One character that I interpret as homonym rather than as a counterpart is the famous feminist Kathy de Bourgh, whose name is reminiscent of Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice. I expected Kathy de Bourgh to be an obnoxious character who would try to derail the romance between Liz and Darcy, as does Lady Catherine in Austen’s novel, but on the contrary, she turns to be warm, wise, and supportive.
14. What about characters who regard themselves as fictional? This is a paradox that breaks ontological boundaries, since by acknowledging their fictionality these characters look at themselves from the perspective of the world of the author, where they do not exist, not from the perspective of the world they inhabit.
15. This division into three circles can also be used for diegetic narratives such as novels, but the distinction between circle 1 and circle 2 is not as clear-cut as in drama, since in drama one circle is enacted and the other narrated, while in diegetic narrative both are narrated. However, circle 2 could be associated with the stories told by characters about the storyworld, as opposed to the main narrator’s representation. In The Odyssey, circle 2 would be Odysseus’s first-person narration of his adventures to the king of Scheria (books 9–12) and circle 1 the third-person narration of all the other books.
16. The loss of sight of Pozzo could be regarded as change, but it cannot be attributed to a temporally situated event.
17. In this reading of Godot I stress the incompleteness of its world, especially of its space and time, but the play also contains a good deal of contradiction, for instance, Pozzo being both blind and able to see; the young boy having and not having given a message to Vladimir and Estragon in act 1.
18. Though I disagree with his position, Richard Walsh (forthcoming) is very consistent in rejecting the notions of both world and immersion. His argument is as follows: “World” is a spatial concept, while “narrative” is a temporal concept. A narrative text is a blend of descriptive passages, which mobilize our “spatial cognition” but during which time stands still, and of properly narrative passages, which mobilize our “narrative cognition.” According to Walsh, the notion of world carries an implication of totality and completeness that would force readers into superfluous attempts to fill in the blanks in the text. He cites as an example of a frivolous attempt to construct a world the map included in the English-language edition of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La jalousie. Rejecting what I have called the principle of minimal departure as requiring the construction of meaningless details, Walsh proposes instead a “relevance” theory of reading that limits mental activity to those imaginings that allow readers to make sense of fictional texts despite their lack of real-world truth. Since there is no such thing as a storyworld, there is no phenomenon such as immersion: Walsh regards immersion as a property of media, not of narratives. The minimalist, rather puritanical mode of reading prescribed by the criterion of relevance prevents indeed any kind of immersive experience, for immersion requires far richer acts of imagination than a strict adherence to the propositional content of the text, to which “relevance” seems to be limited. My arguments against Walsh are as follows: (1) The notion of storyworld does not require an exhaustive filling in of its space: there is a difference between assuming that there is a continuous spatial fabric between the locations mentioned in a narrative text and having to visualize every point in this fabric. (2) It is possible to imagine too little to make sense of a narrative text, but readers cannot be guilty of imagining too much as long as they respect textual information. Mapping La jalousie is a way to engage with the text. (3) Narrative cannot be reduced to the temporal, no more than worlds can be reduced to the spatial. Walsh claims that a term such as spatiotemporal is just a conceptual juxtaposition, not a synthesis, but any attempt to imagine character movements demonstrates the opposite.
Alber, Jan. 2016. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skow Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. 2010. “Unnatural Narrative, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18 (2): 113–36.
Aristotle. 1945. Poetics. Translated and introduction by Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin Books.
Auslander, Philip. 2015. “Théâtre et performance: L’Évasion de la représentation.” In Corps en scènes, edited by Catherine Courtet, Mireille Besson, Françoise Lavocat, and Alain Viala. Paris: CNRS Edition.
Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Beckett, Samuel. 1952/54. En attendant / Waiting for Godot. Bilingual edition translated from the French by the author. New York: Grove Press.
Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
Currie, Gregory. 1990. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Doležel, Lubomír. 1998. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Forster, E. M. (1927) 1953. Aspects of the Novel. London: E. Arnold.
Genette, Gérard. 1976. “The Boundaries of Narrative.” New Literary History 8:1–13.
Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Jenkins, Henry. 2007. “Transmedia Storytelling 101.” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, March 22. http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html.
Knight, Lionel Charles. (1933) 1964. “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism.” In Explorations, 15–54. New York: New York University Press.
Kripke, Saul. 1972. “Naming and Necessity.” In Semantics of Natural Language, edited by D. Davidson and G. Harman, 253–355. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Maître, Doreen. 1983. Literature and Possible Worlds. London: Middlesex Polytechnic Press.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1980. Lectures on Literature. Edited by Fredson Bowers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1977. Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Prince, Gerald. 1982. Narratology. The Hague: Mouton.
Racine, Jean. 1998. Phèdre. Petits classiques Larousse, presented, edited, and annotated by Laurence Giavarini and Eve-Marie Rollinat-Levasseur. Paris: Editions Larousse-Bordas.
Ronen, Ruth. 1994. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
—. 2009. “Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative.” Style 43 (2): 142–64.
—. 2011. “Narratology and Cognitive Science: A Problematic Relation.” Style 44 (4): 469–95.
—. 2015. “Texts, Worlds, Stories: Narrative Worlds as Cognitive and Ontological Concept.” In Narrative Theory, Literature, and New Media: Narrative Minds and Virtual Worlds, edited by Mari Hatavera, Matti Hyvärinen, Maria Mäkelä, and Frans Mäyrä, 13–28. London: Routledge.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon, eds. 2014. Storyworlds across Media. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Saint-Gelais, Richard. 2005. “Transfictionality.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 612–13. London: Routledge.
—. 2011. Fictions transfuges: La transfictionnalité et ses enjeux. Paris: Seuil.
Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, and Ioana Vultur. 2004. “Mimesis.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 309–10. London: Routledge.
Todorov, Tzvetan. (1970) 1975. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
Virtanen, Tuija. 1992. “Issues of Text Typology: Narrative—a ‘Basic’ Type of Text?” TEXT 12:293–310.
Walsh, Richard. 2017. “Beyond Fictional Worlds: Narrative and Spatial Cognition.” In Emerging Vectors of Narratology, edited by John Pier and Philippe Roussin, 461–78. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Walton, Kendall. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 1980. Worlds of Works of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press.