| The idea of "narrative worlds" has a long history in both narrative theory and theory of the novel, yet despite such traditions, the concept of "world" itself has been substantively under-theorized within these discourses. In lieu of having a strong theory of "world," there's a tendency to supplant the phenomenon with something for which one already does have an operable theory: a system, a method, a socio-cultural whole. However, such models never seem to conjure or adequately explain the complexity and immersiveness of the literary worlds they purport to describe; both "world" and a means for understanding and describing it seem inevitably elusive. In this project, I present a theory of narrative worlds that attends to and explains both the richness and elusiveness of these worlds. Using a phenomenological framework informed by the work of Martin Heidegger, this theory offers a means of rethinking the novel as a genre, of challenging some of the prevailing assumptions about what narrative does, and of explaining the preoccupations, problems, and potential limits of narrative theory, especially those contemporary strains informed by cognitive science, with respect to such issues as fictionality, perspective, modelling, and the immersiveness of narrative.;After presenting a sustained critique of cognitive approaches such as Text World Theory and David Herman's notion of "storyworld" and laying out a Heideggerian understanding of world, the dissertation presents a new theory of the novel, and the 20th century novel in particular, while arguing more generally that any narrative both is grounded by and produces an "articulation" of a phenomenological world for its readers and that narrative is itself essentially "disclosive." The dissertation then explores the articulated worlds of three 20th century novels that differ greatly in their historical contexts, styles, narrative structures, and concerns: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Richard Wright's Native Son, and David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Attention to the implications of these articulations of world can alter our understandings of alterity, character, modern subjectivity, and aesthetic form in Woolf's work; of space, racialized bodies, and radical politics in Wright's novel; and of postmodernity, narrative form, and the ethics that underpin Mitchell's novel. |
