Showing papers by "Marie-Laure Ryan published in 2006"

Avatars Of Story

Abstract: Since its inception, narratology has developed primarily as an investigation of literary narrative fiction. Linguists, folklorists, psychologists, and sociologists have expanded the inquiry toward oral storytelling, but narratology remains primarily concerned with language-supported stories. In Avatars of Story, Marie-Laure Ryan moves beyond literary works to examine other media, especially electronic narrative forms. By grappling with semiotic media other than language and technology other than print, she reveals how story, a form of meaning that transcends cultures and media, achieves diversity by presenting itself under multiple avatars. Ryan begins by considering, among other texts, a 1989 Cubs-Giants baseball broadcast, the reality television show Survivor, and the film The Truman Show. In all these texts, she sees a narrative that organizes meaning without benefit of hindsight, anticipating the real-time dimension of computer games. She then expands her inquiry to new media. In a discussion covering text-based interactive fiction such as Spider and Web and Galatea, hypertexts such as Califia and Patchwork Girl, multimedia works such as Juvenate, Web-based short narratives, and Facade, a multimedia, AI-supported project in interactive drama, she focuses on how narrative meaning is affected by the authoring software, such as the Infocom parser, the Storyspace hypertext-producing system, and the programs Flash and Director. She also examines arguments that have been brought up against considering computer games such as The Sims and EverQuest as a form of narrative, and responds by outlining an approach to computer games that reconciles their imaginative and strategic dimension. In doing so, Ryan distinguishes a wide spectrum of narrative modes, such as utilitarian, illustrative, indeterminate, metaphorical, participatory, emergent, and simulative. Ultimately, Ryan stresses the difficulty of reconciling narrativity with interactivity and anticipates the time when media will provide new ways to experience stories. Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar and the author of, most recently, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media.

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 PWmodel 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. My thanks go to the anonymous readers of Poetics Today, whose comments have been a precious help in revising this essay, especially the part devoted to physics. I take responsibility for whatever errors the text may still contain. Poetics Today 27:4 (Winter 2006) doi 10.1215/03335372-2006-006 © 2006 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics 634 Poetics Today 27:4 The idea that reality—the sum total of what exists—may include other worlds than the world that we experience every day ranks near the very top of the topics that fascinate the human mind.We find its manifestations in a wide variety of fields: in medieval cartography, with the representations of fantastic creatures in the terrae incognitae that lie beyond the limits of the known world (Brown 1977 [1949]); in philosophy, with Leibniz’s doctrine of the monads (Rescher 1991); in logic, with the postulation of possible worlds to define the truth conditions of modal operators and counterfactuals (Kripke 1963; Lewis 1973); in technology, with the hype that surrounded the development of virtual reality (Ryan 2001), a hype fueled by the hope that the computer could physically transport us into alternate realities; and, of course, in literature and the visual arts, which did not await the development of science fiction to produce a steady stream of foreign worlds. Last but not least, the idea of multiple realities has made its way into theoretical physics and narrative theory. In the first two parts of this essay, I compare and contrast how these two disciplines conceive ontological puralism; in the third part, I explore how narrative fiction deals with the notion of a multiverse composed of parallel worlds. Multiple Realities in Physics In physics, the idea of multiple realities is known as the ‘‘parallel universes’’ or as the ‘‘many-worlds’’ interpretation. (World and universe are used interchangeably.) This interpretation is extremely controversial in the physics community, andmany eminent scientists—for instance, the late Irish physicist John S. Bell (1989) or the respected science writer Martin Gardner (2001)—find it completely absurd; but it has recently received a lot of publicity in books and journals of scientific popularization. In my presentation of the notion of parallel universes, I will follow a taxonomy proposed by Max Tegmark (2003) in Scientific American, but I will also rely on work by other authors in my discussions of the individual categories. Tegmark distinguishes four types of parallel universes, which he associates with four ‘‘levels’’ of the multiverse, the global scheme that encompasses everything that exists.Though Tegmark does not explain the rationale of his ordering of levels, it seems that the higher the level, the more improbable it is that human beings will ever visit its worlds.1 1. If it were not for the third level, one could also say that the higher the level, the more adjustments are needed in the laws of physics compared to the laws of our world. But level 3 requires no adjustments, as we will see below. Ryan • From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds 635

Semantics, Pragmatics, and Narrativity: A Response to David Rudrum

Abstract: In his article "From Narrative Representation to Narrative Use: Towards the Limits of Definition," David Rudrum argues that definitions of narrative based on what the text represents are fundamentally flawed: "As long as narratology remains tied to [a conception of narrative as representation], and tied to a philosophy of language that foregrounds signification above and before questions of use and practice, it seems that a satisfactory way of defining and classifying its subject matter will continue to elude it" (203). Here, in a nutshell, is the argument. Narrative has traditionally been defined as the representation of a sequence of events. But this definition fails to capture the distinction between a set of instructions for building model airplanes (Figure Two in the text) and what Rudrum regards as a genuine narrative, namely a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip (Figure One). To distinguish the narrative status of these two representations of sequences of events, we must take into consideration how the text is used.