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FROM REPRESENTATION TO REALITY: THE DYNAMICS OF THE EXPERIENCE OF FICTIVE REALITIES
Abstract
The study is primarily an original essay, rather than a research project, in the area of reader response theory. It focuses on what occurs when a reader finds his experience with a particular fiction is no longer with a representation of a reality, but a reality itself. Its scope is broad, and includes anything that might be regarded as fictive. The definition of a fiction posited is that a fiction is a representation which is regarded as somehow constituting or embodying its own reality. A major concern is to define the respective roles in fictive experience of subjective and objective elements. Another major concern is to offer a series of paradigms which affords a description of fictive experience transcending disciplinary and ideological boundaries and biases, and so enabling discourse amongst the many conflicting parties of fictive theorists. The strategy is to posit fictive reality in terms of a logically-based dynamism. Chapter One introduces the main definition, and also defines the fictive object. Chapter Two proceeds to deal with reader expectations and recollections, which are defined as the dynamic core of fictive experience. Chapter Three offers a paradigm of the three aspects or orientations of fictive experience: dramatic, thematic, and formatic. Chapter Four examines first a scheme in which fictive activity is broken down into four essential types: articulation, interpretation, appropriation, and motivation, and then posits another paradigm defining three basic reader intentions towards any particular fictive encounter: recreational, critical, and instrumental. The chapter concludes by going into four basic dynamic elements of fictive encounter: identification, unification, limitation, and valuation. Chapter Five posits a basic element of human understanding of reality as involving a sense of possibility, probability, and necessity, and tying those concepts into an understanding of three basic levels of fictive representation: specific, generic, and anagogic. Chapter Six is concerned mainly with relating all the various paradigms to each other.
Subject Area
Literature
Recommended Citation
NISBETT, MICHAEL WILLIAM, "FROM REPRESENTATION TO REALITY: THE DYNAMICS OF THE EXPERIENCE OF FICTIVE REALITIES" (1986). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8624608.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8624608