Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses

12 Introduction
worlds) on the basis of their real-world knowledge; cognitive narratology
seeks to describe the range of cognitive processes that are involved. Alan
Palmer (2004) and Lisa Zunshine (2006), for instance, argue that the way in
which we attempt to make sense of fictional narratives is similar to the way in
which we try to make sense of other people. They argue that we understand
narratives by understanding the minds of the characters and narrators, that
is, their intentions and motivations. Most importantly, cognitive approaches
are based on a constructivist theory of reading, arguing that what we read
into texts is not necessarily “there” as a pre-given fact. This emphasis ties in
with non-essentialist, pluralist, and generally pragmatic concerns and preoccupations,
thereby establishing connections with recent developments in
linguistics, where the direction of research has also moved from syntax to
pragmatics and on to cognitive approaches. Cognitive narratology can thus
be argued to affect the status of categories of narratological analysis; it shifts
the emphasis from an essentialist, universal, and static understanding of narratological
concepts to seeing them as fluid, context-determined, prototypical,
and recipient-constituted.
Possible-worlds theory is an area of narratological study which links
with postclassical narratology in interesting ways. The basic assumption of
possible-worlds theory is that reality is a universe composed of a plurality
of distinct elements. The actual world (AW) is the central element, and it is
surrounded by various alternative possible worlds (APWs), such as dreams,
fantasies, hallucinations, and the worlds of literary fiction. For a world to be
possible it must be linked to the center by “accessibility relations.” Important
possible-worlds theorists are Lubomír Doležel (1998), Marie-Laure Ryan
(1991, 1999, 2001, 2005, and 2006), and Ruth Ronen (1994). It could be
argued that Marie-Laure Ryan’s more recent research (1999, 2001, and 2004)
constitutes an interesting postclassical development over Doležel’s and her
own earlier work (Ryan 1991). Her forays into media studies highlight the
way in which the underlying cognitivist and transmedial aspects of her 1991
model have been extended and explicated in the last fifteen years. Furthermore,
Ryan has recently shown that postmodern narratives have found in the
concepts of possible-worlds theory “a productive plaything for [their] games
of subversion and self-reflexivity” (2005: 449). She also looks at potential
analogies between parallel universes in physics on the one hand and possible
worlds in narrative fiction on the other (esp. Ryan 2006). Ryan’s concept of
immersion (Ryan 2001), moreover, builds a bridge to cognitive studies of narration.
We just referred to the pragmatic revolution in linguistics with the development
of context-oriented models in text linguistics, speech act theory,