Cognition an abyme

[Ya Sam]

I don't know if it's been mentioned before but this article by McHale seems 
to be interesting. I have been his fan since Postmodernist Fiction. Here he 
tackles his favourite en abyme theme on the example of several authors 
including TRP. Only abstract is available which gives some food for thought 
nevertheless.


Abstract

One of the functions of literary fiction, in particular narrative fiction, 
is the construction, circulation and maintenance of world-models.  
Literature, Lotman taught us, is a secondary modeling system: using the 
primary modeling system of language as its vehicle, it constructs models of 
and models for reality.  It also models itself: narrative fictions regularly 
embed within their own continuums secondary worlds – inset narratives, found 
manuscripts, ekphrastic descriptions, remediations of non-verbal media, 
micro-worlds and paraspaces, etc. – that mirror the primary worlds framing 
them.  Such structures en abyme have typically been treated as uncanny 
disruptions, fatally compromising fiction’s world-modeling function, at 
worst summoning up the specters of crippling paradox and infinite regress.  
In fact, world-modeling and self-modeling are interdependent functions of 
fiction; they complement and sustain each other.  Internal scale-models make 
the “outer” fiction’s model of the world salient.  Far from disrupting the 
primary world, they hold a mirror up to it, providing the reader with a kind 
of schematic diagram of it, or an instruction manual for its proper 
operation. Moreover, the relationship between the “outer” world and the 
internal scale-model, the way one maps onto the other, can itself serve as a 
model for the relationship between the fictional world as a whole and the 
real world – the world “out there,” beyond the text.  So internal 
scale-models yield knowledge of the fictional world, but also of how the 
fictional world models the real.

          The paper revisits the literature on mise en abyme, as well as 
Jameson’s powerful notion, derived from the urban planning literature, of 
cognitive mapping.  Case-studies include Cervantes’ Don Quixote, read in the 
light of Fernand Braudel’s cognitive mapping of the Mediterranean world in 
the age of Philip II; micro-worlds and scale-models en abyme in science 
fiction (Gibson, Sterling), and in the American mega-novel (Sorrentino, 
Pynchon, Barth).

http://partialanswers.huji.ac.il/articles.asp?article_id=92

_________________________________________________________________
Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search! 
http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/