Enrico Terrone: "Fictional Worlds and their Peripheries"

Enrico Terrone, University of Genoa: “Fictional Worlds and their Peripheries: An Artifactual Approach"

Abstract
This paper casts fictions as artifacts that perform the phenomenological function of eliciting an imaginative exploration of a fictional world in virtue of their representational structure. The fictional world we explore when we engage with fiction does not limit itself to collecting fictional truths but rather imposes a spatiotemporal structure onto them. The fictional world resembles the actual world in this respect. Yet, to experience the actual world, we must experience ourselves as located within it and tracing a path through it. If the fictional world is not ours, how can we place ourselves in it? I argue that, for this purpose, the fictional world is to be supplemented with a fictional “periphery”. This is the region of the fictional world that keeps track of its artifactual nature—the work-structure’s embassy, as it were, in the world-function. Fictions should create worlds with peripheries whereas nonfictions are not forced to do that because the actual world they represent already has a place for us to explore it.