Annual Conference Vienna 2017

realities and world building

University of Vienna, September 20-23.09.2017, XNUMX

The program and further information can be found at:

http://gff2017.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/k_gff2017/GFF2017.pdf

Creating, experiencing and helping to shape new worlds is a central part of the attraction that the fantastic offers - from experiencing middle earth to outer space, whose "infinite expanses" were filled and curved in almost equally infinite narratives. The term “world” also seems to be almost infinite in such a context: the fantastic creates and varies social and cultural systems, ideologies, biological and climatic conditions, cosmologies, different world ages, etc. It offers almost every (academic) context of knowledge the opportunity to fathom one's potential and self-understanding in a space of possibility and impossibility.

The plurality and the simultaneous existence of different, even contradictory concepts of reality is an established topos of cultural and social sciences.[1] Scientific narratives can easily be placed alongside those of the fantastic without their simultaneous existence in the self-spun web of meaning of culture[2] producing an existential antagonism between the two. This is not because one story is true and the other untrue, but because both are fictional narratives in the sense of Hayden White, who assumes that scientific and literary functions have more in common than what separates them.[3] If a fantastic story shows inner coherence, according to Wittgenstein it forms sentences that are just as meaningful[4] as any other story; it (within the framework of this narrowly limited concept of truth) also has the quality of truth as well as Newton's laws. The acceptance of this view leads the fantastic into an existential problem: if every narrative that forms meaningful sentences were perceived as an aspect of the real, the fantastic would no longer be distinguished from other narratives; they disappear.

But in everyday dealings, a dividing line is drawn between the fantastic and other aspects of the real. How can this everyday practice be reconciled with what has been said before? How do fantastic worlds arise, in and alongside other multiple world views, in production and reception? What different functions of ordering and appropriating the real do these worlds produce? Designating texts as fantastic is therefore nothing more than a special practice of ascertaining their fictitious character - which raises the question of which structures, contents and traditions stimulate this practice.

Stories are considered fantastic if they violate the reality consensus on which our everyday life is based in decisive assignments of meaning and establish a counter-reality consensus of their own, a “different world”. Within the fantasy, further differentiations of these assignments can be made into genres: Science fiction uses central motifs such as cultural practices and objects (interstellar travel, wormhole generators, etc.) for its world construction, which are not part of the everyday reality consensus, but are within one from this spanned space of possibilities, i.e. can at least be considered as realizable in the future. While the modern consensus on reality, which is strongly influenced by natural science, does not rule out beaming in principle, it fundamentally denies the possibility of summoning demons.

However, in order for fantasy to be able to fulfill its function as a negative of the real, it must be possible to assign an imaginary character to the essential motives of its world structure. At the same time, the premise applies that at least some elements of this "world narrative" must be compatible with the everyday reality consensus. Typical of this integration strategy is the depiction of cultural practices that tie in with established notions of historicity. The reference to a setting based on common ideas of the European Middle Ages achieves both in an ideal-typical way. On the one hand, he distances the narration from the world of the recipient and thus clarifies its fictitious character; on the other hand, he draws on available elements of everyday reality consensus in order to clarify the peculiarity of the fantastic world of the narration.

Wolfgang Iser understands the fictitious "as an intentional act"[5] of feigning, and "(d)the imaginary (...) to a certain extent (as) the image that the viewer makes of the effects of the feigned."[6 ] A kind of world-making takes place in all texts, and the production and reception of these texts is always embedded in changing contexts and other narratives. The purpose of the conference is to highlight and reflect across media those acts of fictitiousness that enable the creation of fantastic worlds, both on a theoretical basis and in the description of concrete tools and procedures that create fantastic imaginations.

Keynotes:
Stefan Ekman (University of Gothenburg, Sweden)
Farah Mendlesohn (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)

Possible topics:

• Intermedial (even media-specific) features and indicators of fantastic worlds in film, TV, literature, (digital) games, etc.
• How does something extradiegetic constitute fantastic worlds and vice versa? From social and cultural systems to ideologies, biological and climatic conditions, cosmologies, different world ages, etc.
• Methods and practices of world building - reflection on economic and technical resources - transparent world building (making ofs, exhibitions, interviews, etc.)
• Building Instructions: Sourcebooks, World Editors, Table-Tops, Miniatures, Dioramas, LARPS
• Of course we are open to more far-reaching suggestions; the conference includes an "Open Track" for presentations whose content goes beyond the area outlined in this call.

Call expired on: 28.02.2017/XNUMX/XNUMX. Contact: thomas.walach@univie.ac.at

download call

 

 

^[1]    See Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, multiple modernities, in: Daedalus 129/1 (2000), pp. 1-29, here p. 1; Ernest Bloch, Tubingen Introduction to Philosophy (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1977), p. 146; See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Wild Thinking (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main 2010.

^[2]    Cf. Clifford Geertz, 'Dense Description. Remarks on an interpretive theory of culture', in: Stephan Kammer/Roger Lüdeke (eds.), Texts on the theory of the text (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005), pp. 274-292.

^[3]    See Hayden White, The importance of shape. Narrative Structures in History (Fischer: Frankfurt am Main 1990), p. 12.

^[4]    See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosopicus, 4.22.

[5] Wolfgang Iser, The Fictional and the Imaginary. Perspectives in Literary Anthropology (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main 1993), p. 20.

[6] Ibid. p. 20f.