UC Santa Barbara

What framework may one use to make sense of the nature and conditions of genesis of fictional worldviews and ways of life, which tend to be found in works of fantastika (an umbrella term for genres like science fiction and fantasy)?

The diversity of such worldviews requires a comparative, multi-level approach, drawing on the methods and findings of disciplines such as cognitive narratology and worldview studies, while using the theoretical resources of disciplines like translation studies and global studies to remain critically attentive to the historically contingent issues and categories relevant to the study of the phenomenon and to the limits of any worldview analysis.

Fictional worldviews and ways of life extend cognition to generate novel worlds-and-selves. Neologisms and allomythoi – and the novums they signify – thus may enable features of novel identities, both individual and collective. This process is inherently spatial and temporal, and deeply linked to the embodied narrative self. Based on this embodied, evolutionary perspective, I supply a novel typology for organizing and understanding fictional worldviews and ways of life.This work finds that worldview studies, in particular, supplies general comparative categories that help evade some of the problems ubiquitous in religious studies and that permit comparative analysis of the full range of diverse worldviews in fantastika. But though cognitive narratology and worldview studies, recently placed anew on an evolutionary foundation, supply a powerful explanatory framework, the phenomenon of the emergence of allomythoi is also historically contingent, rooted in what I call the “borderlands mechanism,” especially manifested in particular subgenres, and oriented, in addition to general, panhuman questions, toward uniquely contemporary concerns.