| Works of fiction often have representations of other texts embedded in them. Sometimes the embedded text is real, like Paradise Lost in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. At other times the represented text exists only within the fictional world, like the governess's letter in James's "The Turn of the Screw." Represented texts, both real and fictitious, appear frequently in literature from Homer through the present. The issue I consider is how the presence of such embedded texts (innertexts) in works of fiction affects the way the reader imagines the fictional world.;Studies of fiction tend to approach fictional narratives either as sets of rhetorical strategies and narratological grammars or ass representations of fictional worlds filled with entities such as characters, settings, history, moral convictions and cultural attitudes. The rhetorical approach emphasizes intensional uses of language and generally denies the role of indexical reference in fiction (e.g. characters are not entities, but only clusters of signs), while the represented-world approach often relies on extensional reference, assuming its validity without examining its semiotic implications (e.g. examining the motivations of characters). Although narrative fiction necessarily integrates intensional and extensional language use, surprisingly few theorists discuss how these work together. Drawing on Eco, Ryan, Margolin, and Walton, I propose that readers of fiction use their imaginations to integrate extensional and intensional references into game worlds---fictional worlds generated from each individual reading of the text. Many issues involving this linguistic duality become apparent when one studies innertexts closely.;In a chapter discussing innertexts in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, I show how this linguistic duality relates to Ingarden's and Iser's work in reader response theory. A chapter on innertexts in A. S. Byatt's Possession and Italo Calvino's If on A Winters Night a Traveler reassesses some of Genette's and Rimmon-Kenan's work on focalization. The final chapter, drawing on Bakhtin's, Bauman's and Silverstein's work on pragmatics, considers the representation of rhetorical patterns to depict fictional cultures in Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home. |
