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, and narrative itself deal with the idea that reality consists of a plurality of worlds. In physics, the existence of parallel universes has been postulated on the cosmic level to describe what lies on the other side of black holes and, on the level of subatomic particles, to avoid the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. In narratology, the philosophical idea of a plurality of possible worlds and the contrast between the actual and the possible provide a model of the cognitive pattern into which readers organize information in order to interpret it as a story. But the many-worlds interpretation of physics and the possible worlds (PW) model of narrative differ in their conception of the ontological status of the multiple worlds: in physics they are all actual, while narrative theory stresses the contrast between actuality and mere possibility. This does not mean that the PW model is incompatible with the many-worlds cosmology proposed by physics: faced with a narrative that presents multiple realities as existing objectively, the theory would simply claim that the actual domain is made up of a number of different worlds and that the distinction actual/nonactual repeats itself within each of these parts. The last section of the essay explores what it takes for a narrative to impose a many-worlds cosmology, distinguishing these narratives from other texts that present contradictory versions of facts and situating them with respect to three types of story common in fantasy and science fiction: the narrative of transworld exploration, the narrative of alternate history, and the time-travel narrative.
Robert Folkenflik : Wolfgang Iser's Eighteenth Century
Abstract : A stage in the history of reading underlies the origins of Wolfgang Iser's method. His distinctive theory of reading is adumbrated in the writings of the period of his original specialty, the eighteenth century. In The Implied Reader Iser takes his theoretical hints and directions from the narrators of Fielding and Sterne. Through an examination of the chapters on eighteenth-century novels in The Implied Reader (and of Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy) as well as the theoretical position of The Act of Reading, this essay argues that by utilizing a range of eighteenth-century writers who insist upon the role of the reader's imagination in a process that leads to different meanings for each, Iser proposes that readers should read as they demonstrably did read during the eighteenth century rather than as they read in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The importance of Wolfgang Iser's early work in the history of Anglo-German aesthetics is that he recovered, brought to consciousness, theorized, and extended the implications of a mode of reading largely bypassed during 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 in contemporary poetry, this essay offers a close reading of Joan Retallack's poem "AID/I/SAPPEARANCE" (1998a) as an extended case study of one use of science: the subversion of scientific language. Retallack uses two connected lines of the postmodern critique of science—linguistic slippage and paradigm-dependency—not to subvert or to critique science as an end in itself but to return attention to the human subject, specifically in the context of AIDS, suggesting that the individual becomes lost in the analytical, object-centered epistemology of science. The essay suggests that, in doing so, Retallack offers a defense of the subject on the basis of postmodern theories known for their critique of subjectivity.
REVIEW ARTICLE :
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