Abstract
Every narrative invites the creation of a story world1 in the reader’s or listener’s mind. The characters and events of the story transpire within this imagined space, which may be lightly sketched or elaborately described in the text. Some theorists characterize the story world as a projection implied by the action and characters, some as a bounded set of possibilities strongly guided by and partially constituting genre, and some as a fictional level, surrounded by nonfictional apparatus (and at times containing additional layers of fiction within it). Bakhtin’s chronotope (discussed as a keyword in Chapter 6) combines the time/place of the narrative level in order to characterize a genre’s and story’s possibilities. The details of place and space that contribute to the imagining of the story world are ordinarily referred to as the setting. The elements of setting resemble fictional characters, the other ‘existents’ inside story worlds, in that they provide the particulars out of which readers create fictional worlds in their minds. Sometimes narratives demand that readers imagine worlds inside worlds, not always in conformity with the laws of physics. Theories of fictional worlds and spatiality in literature are discussed in the next chapter, where I consider the fictional worlds that are designed to contain other worlds, as in some fantasy fiction. This chapter takes on a more limited task, the description of the manipulation of stories within stories that occurs when a character becomes a narrator, or when a story is presented inside another story.
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References
Barth, John, ‘Tales within Tales within Tales,’ Antaeus 43 (1981) 45–63. A writer’s view of embedding.
Dällenbach, Lucien, The Mirror in the Text (University of Chicago Press, 1989). On mise en abyme.
Furedy, Viveca, ‘A Structural Model of Phenomena with Embedding in Literature and Other Arts,’ Poetics Today 10:4 (1989), 45–69. On embedding.
Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cornell University Press, 1980), 227–37. On narrative levels.
Lemon, Lee T. and Marion J. Reis (ed. and trans.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (University of Nebraska Press, 1965). See Victor Shklovsky on defamiliarization (13–21) and Boris Tomashevsky on ‘laying bare the device’ (84).
Nelles, William, ‘Stories within Stories: Narrative Levels and Embedded Narrative,’ Studies in the Literary Imagination 215:1 (1992), 79–96. Nelles believes that all embedded narratives involve to some degree the effects of metalepsis.
Reid, Ian, Narrative Exchanges (Routledge, 1992). Reid treats four different sorts of framing in narrative: circumtextual, extratextual, intratextual, and intertextual.
Ron, Moshe, ‘The Restricted Abyss: Nine Problems in the Theory of Mise en Abyme,’ Poetics Today 8 (1987), 417–38.
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© 2003 Suzanne Keen
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Keen, S. (2003). Levels: Realms of Existence. In: Narrative Form. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503489_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230503489_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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