Volume 51, Issue 1

Possible Worlds Theory has commonly been invoked to describe fictional worlds and their relationship to the actual world. As an approach to genre, the relationship between fictional worlds and the actual world is also constitutive of specific text types. By drawing on the notion of accessibility relations, different genres can be classified based on the distance between their fictional worlds and the actual world. Maître, Doreen. 1983. Literature and possible worlds . Middlesex: Middlesex University Press for example, in what is considered the first attempt to adapt accessibility relations from logic to literary studies, distinguishes between four text types depending on the extent to which their fictional worlds can be seen as possible, probable, or impossible in the actual world. Developing Maître’s work, Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991a. Possible worlds and accessibility relations: A semantic typology of fiction. Poetics Today 12. 553–576, c.f. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 1991b. Possible worlds, artificial intelligence, and narrative theor y. Bloomington: Indiana University Press) creates a comprehensive taxonomy of accessibility relations that may be perceived between fictional worlds and the actual world. This includes assuming compatibility with the actual world in terms of physical laws, general truths, people, places, and entities. Using her taxonomy, she then offers a typology of 13 genres to show how fictional worlds created by different genres differ from each other. As it stands, Ryan’s typology does not contain the genre of counterfactual historical fiction, but similar genres such as science fiction and historical confabulation are included. In this article, specific examples from counterfactual historical fiction are analysed to show why it is problematic to place these texts within the genres of historical confabulation or science fiction. Furthermore, as I show, Ryan’s typological model also does not account for some of the characteristic features of the genre of counterfactual historical fiction and as such the model cannot account for all texts within the genre. To resolve this issue, I offer modifications to Ryan’s model so it may be used more effectively to define and distinguish the genre of counterfactual historical fiction.

In 1856, Margaret Garner murdered one child, and attempted to murder three others, rather than return them to slavery. Despite the impact traumas like Garner’s had on abolition, history largely forgets or ignores these gruesome details. In their place come racialist markers that obscure Garner’s likeness. Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s The Modern Medea , for example, depicts Garner with a head wrap and wild eyes. Visual cues such as these perpetuate an undifferentiating representation of Garner, categorized as something between asexual “mammy” and angry “slave.” I argue that Toni Morrison recovers Garner by reconfiguring what Hayden White terms the “historical account” with icons to connote paradoxical significations. Like paradoxes, these icons simultaneously embody complementary and yet oppositional significations without one privileged over the other. Morrison’s historiography thus produces in simultaneity a history told and repealed, which functions iconoclastically not only to engravings such as The Modern Medea but also to the linguistic system that structures an incomplete and surreptitious “historical account.”

This paper investigates representation of perception in the novel. While many critics have great interests in the conceptual level of consciousness, namely characters’ thoughts, they have paid little attention to the perceptual level of consciousness. Characters’ perceptions are important, as they often lead to their cognitive activities, making up their experiences described in narrative. The narrative technique for representing perception that has been studied is what is called represented perception : a narrative technique for rendering a character’s perceptions without explicitly indicating his/her act of perception. However, as in the case of thought representation, there are more ways to represent fictional perception according to the degree of mediacy. This paper suggests a linguistic paradigm for perception representation, examining more mediate and im-mediate ways of representing perception with some historical insights, and reveals the varied importance of perception in the history of the novel.

This article offers our reply to Wolfgang Teubert. 2021. Embodiment is not the answer to meaning: A discussion of the theory underlying the article by Carina Rasse and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. in JLS 50(1). Journey of Literary Semantics 50. 89–106. Teurbert’s article examined discussion of our earlier publication in this journal on metaphorical thinking in people’s literary experiences of J.D. Salinger’s novel “The Catcher in the Rye.” Teubert makes several points about our advocacy of an embodied perspective on literary meaning and interpretation. He argues that literary experience is best characterized in terms of people’s verbalized, reflective statements about the meanings of literary texts. Data from cognitive linguistic analyses and behavioral experiments are less compelling, in his view, because these studies examine embodied metaphors from a discourse-external perspective and mostly focus on people’s fast, mostly unconscious processing of verbal metaphors. Our reply highlights the importance of studying linguistic understanding, and literary experience, along varying time-dimensions, the fact that many linguistic and behavioral studies examine embodied metaphorical thinking in more reflective, social circumstances, exactly as Teubert recommends. Finally, we suggest that looking at literary experience from an embodied perspective is tightly associated with a discourse-analytic point of view. Scholars can never dismiss the reality of embodiment in literary experience because it provides a critical, but not exclusive, constraint on how we express ourselves and enable others to create specific patterns of meaning in the words they read.