The Rhetoric of World-Building
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Date
2018-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Fiction has the capacity to imitate reality, to drastically deviate from it, and to alter mere particulars, by turn offering the reader an interaction with a fictional world either similar to or different from the world in which she sits with the book. This research examines a variety of such interactions from a rhetorical perspective; that is, I’m interested in storyworlds (worlds evoked by narratives) as they’re constructed by authors for some purpose. I track the multilayered experience of storyworld immersion through three literary narratives: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” Each of these storyworlds exhibits a unique degree of difference from the actual world, and I use this variation in difference to construct a theoretical continuum on which every storyworld can be situated. The continuum runs from the primary world (the storyworld that is identical to the actual world in every important way) to the secondary world (the storyworld that is saliently and significantly different from the actual world)––or, say, from historical fiction to hard fantasy. My general claim is that authors place storyworlds at certain points on the continuum in efforts to guide readers’ interpretive and experiential responses. I devote principal attention to what I call the hybrid world, the apparent primary world that cuts across its own realism with one or few impossible or extraordinary phenomena. This arrangement, I argue, provides a uniquely active and demanding reading experience. For if a story takes place in a fictive version of our world, yet it contains a phenomenon that our world deems impossible, we must work to understand how and why and to what end that phenomenon has happened in such world. By meeting the challenge to our understanding offered by these hybrid worlds, we sharpen our cognitive capacities. In addition, by attending to the ways hybrid worlds shed light on our actual world, we expand our knowledge of how to live in it. To conclude I briefly discuss three hybrid-world variants––Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein––to illustrate how this essay’s theoretical model can be useful for talking about the rhetorical role of world-building in relation to narratives and storyworlds of various kinds going forward.
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Keywords
Storytelling, Rhetoric, Narrative, Worlds, Narratology