ABSTRACT Until recently, scholars have often assumed that in his exile writings, Ovid abandoned myth and the mythical method of composing poetry; yet it was only his way of creating cultural myth that underwent a metamorphosis. This article argues that in Elegy 10 of Book III of the Tristia, Ovid is not documenting the literal conditions of his exile in Tomis (Dobrudja), but rather constructing the myth of a land of eternal winter bereft of love. This myth is the product of his literary imagination, nourished by the topos of frozen, fearsome Scythia as it appears in Greco-Roman literature (Herodotus, Xenophon, and Virgil). Ovid had already revealed his antipathy toward this region in the Metamorphoses, long before he was relegated there. The cultural myth of a land of unending frost—an externalization of his wounded, emotionally frozen inner world, plunged into an abyss devoid of love—emerges in the Tristia as a carefully wrought, multidimensional, and symbolically rich creation of universal scope. It is a myth that renders exile as a realm of solitude, alienation, and fear (locus horridus). Within this myth, Ovid shapes a catastrophic vision of the world fatally paralyzed by frost: the cosmic death of all nature, stripped of life and love.
ABSTRACT This article attempts to characterize and typify the poetic potential of phrases that take the form of “x of x” or “x’s x.” While some, like “heart of hearts,” are prevalent in everyday discourse, examples are drawn primarily from American modernist poet E. E. Cummings, whose poetics relied on this rhetorical formula and who used it extensively and creatively throughout his poetry for multiple poetic goals. To account for the wide range of uses and functions of “x of x,” they are divided into three main types, gradually increasing in poetic qualities: the basic genitive, like “the hope of hope,” entails a recursive structure and a sense of self-containment and potential for infinity; the superlative genitive, like “queen of queens,” entails a hyperbolic intensification of the x; and the cryptic genitive, like “the ears of my ears,” entails a teasing out of a vague, metaphorical term x that seems the essence of the literal x.
ABSTRACT Traditional scandal theory focuses on the role of affect in scandalization phases but has overlooked the bodily and cognitive dimensions that initiate and sustain scandalization. This article offers a rhetorical and narratological analysis that proposes a new conceptual tool for literary scandal theory. It introduces the phenomenon of performative disgust which refers to the verbal expression of physical, emotional, and cognitive revulsion to moral transgressions in literature. In the 1890 reception of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” two distinct response waves emerged: an initial wave of embodied and affective disgust, followed by cognitively articulated emotional repulsion. The article conducts a discourse analysis of contemporaneous newspaper articles, interpreted through a new historicist as well as a cognitive and embodied narratological lens. It illustrates how performative disgust serves as a strategy that seeks to counter moral provocations in literature. Rather than producing empirical data, this study develops and applies a theoretical framework to inform literary scandal theory by highlighting that the expression of bodily, affective, and cognitive responses is integral to collective processes that shape communication about moral values for (late nineteenth-century) readers.
This article provides a critical discussion of Lisa Zunshine’s monograph The Secret Life of Literature in the context of her previous scholarly publications as well as relevant research in psychology and related fields. Renown for her contributions to cognitive-evolutionary literary studies, Zunshine’s new project, like her previous work, focuses on theory of mind (also known as mindreading or folk psychology); in this offering, she emphasizes how intuitions about other minds shape reader and audience interactions with the arts. Highlighting the strength of Zunshine’s international range of example literary texts and her valuable attention to cultural differences and political operations, this review essay suggests that both comparison to other arts and a more detailed engagement with the enactivist perspective endorsed in Secret Life would augment the value of this nevertheless valuable book.
The experiment of this article is to have its form mirror-or at least be analogous to-the duality of light referenced in the title to its object of study, progresses by alternating between sections devoted to "Particles" and sections devoted to "Waves" of my argument. The argument itself is about the relation between the nonfictionality of Porter's title and the fictionality of his short story. Using a rhetorical approach to fictionality, this article contends that Porter sets up two-way traffic between the title and the story. The title partially explains his treatment of the love triangle among his character narrator, Heather, her physics teacher Robert, and her boyfriend and eventual husband, Colin. At the same time Porter's treatment points to significant differences between the nonhuman scientific phenomena named in the title and the human experience of love. Ultimately, the science illuminates the fiction, and the fiction illuminates the science. And if the experiment in form works, it further illuminates the story's play with the relationships between science and fiction.
While fiction-science (fi-sci) pattern mapping has been discussed as a way to use fictional patterns to help learners understand analogous patterns in science, this article embeds that pedagogical objective within a larger framework in Literature and Science Studies. If one of the affordances of fictionality is to lower barriers to scientific comprehension, this article argues that, reciprocally, literary engagements with science can provide the spur and material for critical inquiry and literary interpretation. Grounded in a study of David Lodge's novel Thinks ... , the article's two sections and conclusion thus seek to model the recursive process of literary criticism as a sequence of readings and rereadings that begins with detecting analogies between scientific and fictional patterns. Specifically, this article uses fi-sci pattern mapping to identify, then explore, the intriguing analogy Thinks .. . sets up between the whodunit plot (a fictional pattern) and the phenomenon of quantum superposition, as manifested in Schrodinger's cat paradox. In addition to helping nonscientists understand quantum physics, this analogy serves as the foundation for a counterintuitive reading of the novel's narrative form and ethics and, more broadly, as an illustration of how fi-sci pattern mapping can be integrated into a broader approach to reading in Literature and Science Studies.
This article builds on recent work that extends fictionality beyond narrative, exploring how that capacity operates within the hybrid form of opera. Drawing on Jonathan Culler's literary-historical account of lyric and James Phelan's rhetorical model, it argues that opera's combination of music, language, and performance creates conditions in which lyric and narrative interact to shape representations of scientific thought. Analyses of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach (1976) and Hotel Pro Forma's Tomorrow, in a Year (2009) reveal contrasting strategies. Glass's opera resists narrativity almost entirely, using localized fictional cues within a predominantly lyrical structure to mirror the paradigm-shifting, conceptual shocks of Albert Einstein's theories. Tomorrow, in a Year integrates lyric performance of Charles Darwin's writings with weak narrativity and evolving musical complexity. This hybrid structure produces moments of localized fictionality within a predominantly nonfictional frame to explore biographical and planetary scales. By situating fictionality within lyric structures, this article offers a framework for situating fictionality within hybrid rhetorical modes across media.
This article develops a fictionality-based approach to artificial intelligence, proposing that human-AI interaction unfolds through the dynamics of character engagement. Drawing on narrative theory, cognitive science, and AI studies, it examines large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude, and LAURA (modeled on Laura Palmer) as fictional objects of relation-emergent agents whose apparent minds arise through interpretive stances, narrative framing, and phenomenological opacity. Integrating Dennett's notions of real patterns and intentional stance with theories of characterization and fictionality, it identifies four illusions-of independent agency, independent identity, codependency, and independent poetics-through which users perform mind-building and world-probing exchanges with AI. Distinguishing between designed and emergent fictionality, and between AI immersivity and emersivity, the article shows how linguistic patterning and cognitive projection together sustain real yet imagined forms of intersubjectivity. While such patterned engagements enable genuine cognitive and creative extensions, they also expose the ethical perils of counterfeit people. Fictionality, however, offers a training ground for double exposure-the capacity to navigate what is both real and fictive at once. The article concludes by proposing a view of human-AI interactions as introspection by computation: AI as a technology that extends self-knowledge through the externalization of mind.
Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World presents a challenging read, as it transgresses the boundary between fiction and nonfiction to narrate twentieth-century scientific discoveries. Drawing on the rhetorical approach to fictionality, this article argues that Labatut uses fictionality in four distinct ways to achieve various communicative purposes. Fictionality sometimes illuminates scientific ideas, either by creating formal analogies that help readers apprehend abstract and counterlogical concepts or by setting up occasions for accessible explanations of difficult theories. Other times, fictionality explores the role of singular mental activities in scientific innovation or invites reflections on the profound historical and psychological impacts of scientific discoveries, thus critiquing and complementing conventional scientific discourses. Combining conventional with innovative forms of fictionality, Labatut's book ultimately defies the stable global-local hierarchy between fictionality and nonfictionality that defines generic fiction and nonfiction alike, showing instead a deep interdependence between extensive fictionality and extensive nonfictionality. Labatut's generic experimentation illustrates multiple ways in which fictionality and science intersect; it also suggests a profound connection between scientific and literary innovation: embracing limitation, plurality, contradiction, and complementarity, twentieth-century scientific discoveries call for new literary modes where fictionality and nonfictionality intertwine, clash with, and complement each other.
In this Introduction to the special issue, we highlight the power of using fictionality, especially as understood by rhetorical narratology, as a means to the end of conceptualizing science. We first illustrate how what we call the fi-sci pattern mapping framework serves this end, and then offer an overview of the issue's articles. Some present applications of rhetorical fictionality theory, including fi-sci pattern mapping, while others propose alternate approaches to the means-end project of the issue. Together, the articles showcase the many ways in which fictionality has been-and can continue to be-used to enrich our understanding of science.
This article investigates the role of early Danish fiction in negotiating the epistemological shift from superstition to scientific rationality during the Pontoppidan's Menoza (1742-43), it argues that eighteenth-century Danish novelists mobilized fictionality as a rhetorical strategy to promote science and contest irrational belief. Drawing on rhetorical fictionality theory, the analysis elucidates how novelists explicitly signaled their narratives as fictions to distinguish them from erroneous nonfictional discourses and narratives that provoked superstitious beliefs. Holberg's satirical engagement exposes the fallacies of pseudo-science and the belief in false truth claims, whereas Pontoppidan integrates faith and reason by articulating a theologically grounded yet scientifically informed defense of Christianity. Subsequent Danish fiction from the period extends this critical project, employing parody and satire to denounce superstition and advocate science. The article thus demonstrates that, far from opposing scientific discourse, early Danish fiction functioned as an epistemic ally of Enlightenment rationality, actively participating in the cultural formation of modern concepts of knowledge and science.
This article argues that David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest teaches readers to think systems-systemically through a crucial delayed disclosure and readerly reconfiguration. Examining the delayed disclosure of James Orin Incandenza's (JOI's) childhood epiphany about annulation, which appears more than five hundred pages into the novel, the article examines how this new information prompts the reader to reconfigure their understanding of plot, character, and world. The disclosure highlights Wallace's modeling of systems theory in both content and form. On the story level, readers must grasp the feedback loop of annulation itself, the distributed responsibility of scientific innovation, and the complex causality leading from annulation to the ecological and geopolitical realities of the narrative present. On the discourse level, readers are cued to recognize the unmarked interconnections among what they've read so far, recursively doubling back on previous details in the feedback loop of reading: a cognitive process much like a scientific paradigm shift. Turning to Wallace's own annotations of Tom LeClair on systems theory, the article argues for the shared structures between narrative form and systems theory, such that Infinite Jest teaches readers to read-and to think-as systems scientists.
Proliferation of online discourse has changed the communicative dynamics of fiction by weakening the narrative authority of authors. Participatory audiences are empowered to act as quasi-authorial agents able to shift the meaning of narrative texts by co-opting narrative authority. Similar phenomena have been analyzed in relation to, for example, circulation of news stories (Page), but this article aims to shift focus beyond nonfictional social media narratives. The article configures a conceptualization of narrative authority in relation to the classic model of the implied author and to a more recent concept of emergent narrative authority (Dawson and Makela). This theory is refined by analyzing the ways online discourse surrounding HBO's popular TV series Game of Thrones utilizes the affordances of the internet to co-opt the narrative authority of the series. The article concludes with remarks on the new reading strategies and the shifting role of narrative fiction in relation to contemporary political discourse online.
This article explores the interrelation of literary fiction and empathy and how stylistic analysis can provide insights into this interrelation, specifically through the study of point of view (POV) effects from a cognitive perspective. This article proposes the concept of "clash moments" as an area of focus, suggesting that these are parts of a literary text that are more emotionally salient and therefore particularly fruitful for the study of empathy in stylistics. This article argues that empathy in fiction can operate through both schema affirmation and/or reinforcement, where feelings of recognition and identification arise, and schema refreshment, where a reader may empathize with characters and experiences they are largely unfamiliar with or even prejudiced against. This article employs two extracts from the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to illustrate how empathy for the main character, Ifemelu, is potentially achieved in instances where Ifemelu's POV clashes with that of other characters.
