... by Duke University Press 2022 verbal form multi‐plotting narrative counterpoint embedded reading fictive systems Life imitates art, quipped Oscar Wilde. But if such art is the new virtual reality (VR) sort—which virtualizes pictures as inhabitable space—then the witty inversion loses its...

...). How did our own world grow out of the plantation system and its sudden col- lapse? This is precisely what Jones’s 2003 novel The Known World wants to know. Depicting the lives of slaves and slave owners on a fictive plantation in Virginia in 1855, ten years before the Thirteenth Amendment ended...

... to traverse world systems themselves. This focus on movement across fictively constructed ideological and social worlds makes it difficult to extract particular ethical principles from his novels. Murakami thus appears to accept an extreme relativism. Indeed, as a sagacious antagonist in 1Q84 observes...

... Clinker , movement takes on sociological as well as physiological significance. The journey chronicled in that novel reveals the fast-urbanizing social world, uncovers dimensions of the fictive world (new or hidden relationships between characters, for example), and affects characters' inner states...

... –40. Hunter , J. Paul . Occasional Form . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1975 . Iser , Wolfgang . The Act of Reading . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978 . Iser , Wolfgang . The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993...

... narrative and fictional system for inhabiting a modern, secular risk society. By creating future-oriented scenarios (e.g., the Bostonians' suggestions and guesses), modern subjects employ the tools of uncertainty. These fictive scenarios convert a perceived existential threat into familiar genres...

... manifestation as a temple to the arts of manufacture: the Crystal Palace. Victorian glasshouses cre- ated “fictive space” (Isobel Armstrong’s term [176]) that was nonetheless populated by actual living organisms existing, adapting, and, in a word, performing the laws of nature. As such, the glasshouse...

... in the novel. However, it is my contention that what he calls the "perfection" of the "overall system of sexuality" (98) through which "[dlifference must be maintained and dealt with on her, not brought back onto him" (98), was not as complete as Heath would like to believe and that indeed...

... and the End of History.” Ed. Duvall. 75 –92. Derrida , Jacques . Of Grammatology . Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976 . Derrida , Jacques . Positions . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981 . Dussel , Enrique . “Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity...

... prevailing tactic in recent fiction combines the tragic mode with a tone of sincerity in a kind of anticipatory fictive eulogy for our increasingly lost world. Jeanette Winterson's vignette in The Guardian Climate Change Special ( Oct. 2009 ) uses this mode to imagine, from the standpoint...

... the reader to identify the fictive construct of Doro’s slavery with the actual system of slavery that was practiced in the antebellum United States. This identification is reinforced by the fact that Doro’s breeding colony is located within the historical and geographic context of antebellum slavery...

... (on the model of polyglossia) polydoxy , which stages the intersection of profoundly disjunctive belief systems within a single piece of fiction. He produced texts with central mysteries that seem to court a variety of explanations but finally resist the triumph of any one explanatory schema over its...

...," and that novelistic realism has been inextricably implicated in "the ideology of liberal humanism" (180). Postmodem novels defamiliarize this ideology by high- lighting their own status as textual constructs, thereby disallowing readers to interpret their fictive worlds as transparent or neutral reflections...

... the intervention of the will" (Johnson 22). Modern novels are thus more dangerous than old romances to the degree that they seem less fictive. By contrast, Barbauld has no anxiety because modern fiction-a designation including gothic romances, oriental tales, and novels of manners-is always understood...

... precisely our narrator Farmer James, analogizes this transformation to the agricultural technique of transplantation: Urgcd by rz variety ofnrotives, here they came. Everything has tended to regenerate flzeln: new laws, a new mode of living, a new social system; here they are become rtlen...

... the anachronistic dream of recovering the collective experiences of preindustrial life masks the author's insertion into an industrialized system of literary production. The concluding portion of this discussion turns to F. Scott Fitzgerald's affiliated attempt to recreate or refashion the fairy tale...

... time, however, it claims that this world, in which everyone has his or her own position, is an objective fact, and thus something that we all share” (199). Indeed, one has to wonder, as J. Hillis Miller did in his own treatment of Kant: what does a philosophy that aims to develop a system of ethics...

... what is in the abstract a familiar thesis-that advertisement, Raymond Williams's "magic system," in its appeal to consumer faith bor- rows from the structures and techniques of organized religion, just as the modem practice of religion borrows new techniques from advertisement. Although...

... is the witchcraft of our time,” which Fields and Fields invoke in an epigraph to the introduction of their book ( 1 ). An exemplar of mid-twentieth-century antiracism, Montagu likened race thinking to witchcraft in order to censure the fallaciousness of both systems of belief. While Fields and Fields undeniably...

... phenomena of nature" ("Essays" 218-21). What drove Smith and the other system-makers was the conviction that connection was pos- sible: the world could be known. But in that final leap to completion-to matching the full complexity of nature-Smith posits a necessary fictiveness. Acts of "mere...