Poetics Today, Winter 2006

 

Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. Poetics Today presents a remarkable diversity of methodologies and examines a wide range of literary and critical topics. Several thematic review sections or special issues are published in each volume, and each issue contains a book review section, with article-length review essays.

 

Volume 27, Number 4, Winter 2006   

 

Marie-Laure Ryan : From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds: Ontological Pluralism in Physics, Narratology, and Narrative

Abstract : This essay explores how theoretical physics, narratology, andnarrative itself deal with the idea that reality consists ofa plurality of worlds. In physics, the existence of paralleluniverses has been postulated on the cosmic level to describewhat lies on the other side of black holes and, on the levelof subatomic particles, to avoid the paradoxes of quantum mechanics.In narratology, the philosophical idea of a plurality of possibleworlds and the contrast between the actual and the possibleprovide a model of the cognitive pattern into which readersorganize information in order to interpret it as a story. Butthe many-worlds interpretation of physics and the possible worlds(PW) model of narrative differ in their conception of the ontologicalstatus of the multiple worlds: in physics they are all actual,while narrative theory stresses the contrast between actualityand mere possibility. This does not mean that the PW model isincompatible with the many-worlds cosmology proposed by physics:faced with a narrative that presents multiple realities as existingobjectively, the theory would simply claim that the actual domainis made up of a number of different worlds and that the distinctionactual/nonactual repeats itself within each of these parts.The last section of the essay explores what it takes for a narrativeto impose a many-worlds cosmology, distinguishing these narrativesfrom other texts that present contradictory versions of factsand situating them with respect to three types of story commonin fantasy and science fiction: the narrative of transworldexploration, the narrative of alternate history, and the time-travelnarrative.

 

Robert Folkenflik : Wolfgang Iser's Eighteenth Century

Abstract : A stage in the history of reading underlies the origins of WolfgangIser's method. His distinctive theory of reading is adumbratedin the writings of the period of his original specialty, theeighteenth century. In The Implied Reader Iser takes his theoreticalhints and directions from the narrators of Fielding and Sterne.Through an examination of the chapters on eighteenth-centurynovels in The Implied Reader (and of Laurence Sterne: TristramShandy) as well as the theoretical position of The Act of Reading,this essay argues that by utilizing a range of eighteenth-centurywriters who insist upon the role of the reader's imaginationin a process that leads to different meanings for each, Iserproposes that readers should read as they demonstrably did readduring the eighteenth century rather than as they read in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The importance ofWolfgang Iser's early work in the history of Anglo-German aestheticsis that he recovered, brought to consciousness, theorized, andextended the implications of a mode of reading largely bypassedduring the last several centuries.

 

Bryan Walpert : AIDS and the Postmodern Subject: Joan Retallack's "AID/I/SAPPEARANCE"

Abstract : In the context of growing interest in the use of science incontemporary poetry, this essay offers a close reading of JoanRetallack's poem "AID/I/SAPPEARANCE" (1998a) as an extendedcase study of one use of science: the subversion of scientificlanguage. Retallack uses two connected lines of the postmoderncritique of science—linguistic slippage and paradigm-dependency—notto subvert or to critique science as an end in itself but toreturn attention to the human subject, specifically in the contextof AIDS, suggesting that the individual becomes lost in theanalytical, object-centered epistemology of science. The essaysuggests that, in doing so, Retallack offers a defense of thesubject on the basis of postmodern theories known for theircritique of subjectivity.

 

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H. Porter Abbott : Cognitive Literary Studies: The "Second Generation"; The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity NEW BOOKS AT A GLANCE :   Galia Yanoshevsky : L'argumentation aujourd'hui: Positions théoriques en confrontation   Eyal Segal : The Dynamics of Narrative Form: Studies in Anglo-American Narratology   Olaf Grabienski : Elemente der Narratologie (Narratologia, No. 8)   Tamar Yacobi : Poetry's Touch: On Lyric Address