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Thomas L. Martin, Poiesis and Possible Worlds. A Study in Modality and Literary Theory, University of Toronto Press, 2004, 256 p.
ISBN: 0802036414 In Poiesis and Possible Worlds, Thomas L. Martin makes a highly focused intervention in the debate about poststructuralist and postmodern theorizing and offers a philosophical approach to some of the controversial tenets of recent theorists. The result is an important addition to the existing literature on the usefulness of possible worlds theory for literature. |
Martin argues that literary studies remain mired in the anomalies of a linguistic methodology derived from early twentieth-century language philosophy, a view challenged not only by theoretical physics, but also by compelling advances in philosophic semantics. The possible-worlds theory of this book moves beyond the understanding of language as an inescapable medium and toward a view of language as calculus, a theoretical outlook that provides richer means to model a wide range of literary worlds. These possible-worlds insights apply to several fundamental issues in literary and critical theory: not to a theory of fiction as other possible-worlds theorists have suggested, but at a lower level to the definition of literature, to verbal figuration in the theory of metaphor, and to models of reading.
