scholarly journals The Effect of Fantasy Context on Moral Action and Judgment

2021 ◽  
pp. 027623662110197
Author(s):  
Brian Ruedinger ◽  
Jennifer Barnes
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Moral Action ◽  
Interactive Narrative ◽  
Realistic Condition ◽  
Undergraduate Study ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Condition Interaction

Research suggests individuals import real-world facts into fictional worlds based on the type of fact and fictional context. We examined the importation of real-world morality across fictional contexts. Undergraduate (Study 1) and MTurk (Study 2) participants were randomly assigned to read either a realistic or matching fantastical interactive narrative. At seven junctions, participants were presented with a choice between behaving morally and behaving immorally to advance their goals. In Study 3, an MTurk sample judged the actions of a character who behaved immorally. For Study 1, a gender by condition interaction was found, with males electing more immoral actions in the fantasy condition. For Study 2, no such effect was found. Nonetheless, in Study 3, participants judged immoral actions in the realistic condition as more immoral compared to the fantasy context. Across all studies, transportation predicted choosing fewer immoral actions and judging immoral actions more harshly.

scholarly journals BIDRAG TILL EN FIKTIONOLOGISK EPISTEMOLOGI

1970 ◽  
Vol 41 (115) ◽  
pp. 101-110
Author(s):  
Göran Rossholm
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Fictional Worlds

A CONTRIBUTION TO NARRATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY | In the wake of Roman Ingarden’s Das Literarische Kunstwerk many literary theorists have claimed that fictional worlds are “incomplete”,contrary to our real world. This idea is critically examined; the conclusion of the examination is that in most cases the incompleteness thesis is based on confusion between ontology and epistemology. However, in some cases – one example is Kafka’s The Process – the thesis is better warranted, but in these cases incompleteness may just as well be described in semantic terms as vagueness.

scholarly journals Kafkaesque worlds in real time

2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Troscianko
Keyword(s):  
Visual Perception ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Real World ◽  
Perceptual Experience ◽  
Just In Time ◽  
The Real ◽  
Linear Fashion ◽  
The World ◽  
Fictional Worlds

We read in a linear fashion, page by page, and we seem also to experience the world around us thus, moment by moment. But research on visual perception shows that perceptual experience is not pictorially representational: it does not consist in a linear, cumulative, totalizing process of building up a stream of internal picture-like representations. Current enactive, or sensorimotor, theories describe vision and imagination as operating through interactive potentiality. Kafka’s texts, which evoke perception as non-pictorial, provide scope for investigating the close links between vision and imagination in the context of the reading of fiction. Kafka taps into the fundamental perceptual processes by which we experience external and imagined worlds, by evoking fictional worlds through the characters’ perceptual enaction of them. The temporality of Kafka’s narratives draws us in by making concessions to how we habitually create ‘proper’, linear narratives out of experience, as reflected in traditional Realist narratives. However, Kafka also unsettles these processes of narrativization, showing their inadequacies and superfluities. Kafka’s works engage the reader’s imagination so powerfully because they correspond to the truth of perceptual experience, rather than merely to the fictions we conventionally make of it. Yet these texts also unsettle because we are unused to thinking of the real world as being just how these truly realistic, Kafkaesque worlds are: inadmissible of a complete, linear narrative, because always emerging when looked for, just in time.

Non-Compliants, Brimpers, and She-Romps

2019 ◽  
pp. 588-610
Author(s):  
Henry Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Alternative Conceptions ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
Future Developments ◽  
Sex Comedy ◽  
Women In Prison ◽  
Fictional Worlds

Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Bitch Planet and Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals model the role comic books can play in fostering important civic conversations. Both draw inspiration from exploitation cinema genres (the women-in-prison film, the sex comedy) but reimagine them to embrace alternative conceptions of gender and sexuality. Both also construct “community pages” that inspire and support “uncomfortable conversations” among their fan base—DeConnick’s Non-Compliants and Fraction’s Brimpers. These exchanges construct what Michael Saler describes as “public spheres of the imagination,” communities brought together around periodical publications that create intimate conversations among strangers that use reflections about fictional worlds to contemplate real-world issues. These comic-book publics inspire future developments within these series but also hold the potential to inspire real-world activism.

Digital Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Daniel Punday
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Real World ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Digital Writing ◽  
Digital Texts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Digital Work ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Existing Data

Through the framing concept of the ‘platform’, this chapter shows how digital texts frequently impose voluntary constraints upon themselves. Digital media distinguish between what Lev Manovich calls the database and interface. Print texts have only one interface on their fictional worlds, while in a digital work our encounter with that material is variable. Initially this distinction manifested itself in works like hypertext fiction that still functioned within a traditional literary framework of authorship. More recent work has, however, exploited text generated in other ways: through communal authorship, or through computational models, where texts are generated either out of a fixed body of material or in response to real-world events. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary examples, this chapter shows how the digital writer working within the boundaries of these self-imposed constraints resembles a curator or remix artist. He or she becomes an ‘author’ by arranging existing data in novel and meaningful ways.

scholarly journals Silent Listening

Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-76
Author(s):  
James Wierzbicki
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Edgar Allan Poe ◽  
Radio Drama ◽  
The Real ◽  
Horror Fiction ◽  
Dynamic Patterns ◽  
Fictional Worlds

This essay explores how one “listens to”—that is to say, how one takes in, makes sense of, and reacts to—“sounds” that are not really sounds at all but that are simply evocations of sounds served up by the authors of fiction. Although the essay’s conclusions apply to literary sounds in general, the examples on which the essay bases its observations and arguments are drawn—because their affective range is so very, very wide—from the vintage literature of so-called horror fiction. After a discussion of why some instances of scary literary sounds are more potent than others, emphasis is placed on sounds featured in the work of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, writers celebrated for their “aurality” yet whose structural use of sonic imagery—in dynamic patterns in the case of Lovecraft, as markers of plot points in the case of Poe—has hitherto been neglected. Throughout the essay parallels are of course drawn between literary sounds and actual sounds encountered both in the real world and in the fictional worlds of film, television, and radio drama. Readers of the essay are invited to decide for themselves, but it is suggested here that “silent listening”—because it demands creative involvement on the part of its participants—results in a richer aesthetic experience.

Once More into the Breach

2020 ◽  
pp. 260-277
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
The Way

This essay contributes to ongoing scholarly debate about the concepts of diegetic and nondiegetic music renewed by Robynn Stillwell’s proposal of a “fantastical gap.” More specifically, the author interrogates Ben Winters’ notion of a “nondiegetic fallacy” wherein Winters asserts that the viewer’s comprehension of manifestly unrealistic elements in cinema apply equally to consideration of the soundtrack. Rather than assume a priori that music belongs to a register external to the diegesis, we should consider the possibility that music has an ontological existence in each film’s peculiar universe irrespective of whether the characters within that world can hear it. Although the “nondiegetic fallacy” seems defensible from an ontological perspective, the author contends that Winters neglects the “principle of minimal departure,” an axiom used to explain why viewers assume certain continuities between their real-world experience and the fictional worlds they encounter. Without this heuristic, viewers would be unable to comprehend any cinematic fiction insofar as they’d have to track a potentially limitless set of questions about the way each unique filmic universe operates. This chapter also argues that Winters’s nondiegetic fallacy ignores music’s role as part of an integrated soundtrack. As shown in an analysis of The Fallen Sparrow, the premises of the nondiegetic fallacy apply equally to offscreen or subjective sound. By examining the vococentric nature of the soundtrack and its attendant principles of maximal sonic clarity, the author defends the utility of the diegetic/nondiegetic distinction by showing its necessity to spectators’ comprehension of film characters’ actions and motivations.

Co-Imagination of Fictional Worlds in Film Viewing

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 230-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eduard Sioe-Hao Tan ◽  
Valentijn Visch
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Actual World ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Popular Film ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Typical Experience ◽  
Film Experience ◽  
First Time ◽  
Film Viewing ◽  
Intense Emotion

The typical experience of narrative film is characterized by a remarkable intensity as to absorption and emotion. Current explanations attribute the experience to the realistic perceptual impact of the film. This theoretical article sets out to explain the experience as the result first of the film-viewer's acts of imagination of fictional worlds. More specifically, it seems suitable to conceptualize the film experience as arising from pretense play. Pretense play can afford room for free imagination leading to intense emotion, as well as restrictions to the imagination “quarantining” ( Leslie, 1987 ) pretended fictional worlds from the real world, thus safeguarding the enjoyability and adaptiveness of the experience. Applying the concept of joint pretense for the first time to film, we follow Walton (1990) in his account of fiction as an institutionalized form of pretense play enabling intense emotional experiences in the cinema, including unpleasant ones to be appreciated by film-viewers. Thus, the model of co-imagination has as components (a) the generation of fictional film worlds—the acts of pretense in the narrower sense; (b) the participation in; and (c) the appreciation of these. We argue that the account of the experience can be improved if it is conceived as the outcome of joint pretense, in which film-viewers in their imagination activity team up with filmmakers—experts by eminence in prompting the viewers’ imagination. Finally, in our model of co-imagination in popular film joint pretense acts are layered ( Clark, 1996 ) as to the contents of the fictional worlds, with the lowest layer representing the collaboration for imagination between filmmaker and film-viewer in the actual world and the higher ones representing fictional worlds of increasing depth of imagination. Because of asymmetric access relations among layers, returns to the actual world in advanced pretense are difficult, which helps quarantining and the sense of absorption.

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