Review: Anne Besson, Constellations. Des mondes fictionnels dans l'imaginaire contemporain (2015)

Possible Worlds, Virtual Worlds

“…Now people distinguish far more diversified relations to avatars (Meadows, 2008 ;Di Filippo, 2012 ;Georges 2012). The digital natives have a far more ludic and distanced relation to the avatars than their elders (Besson 2015).…”

“…

The affinity between the imaginary employed in possible worlds and cyberculture is so obvious that it has barely attracted scholars' interest until recently. Several of them (Caïra 2007(Caïra , 2011Besson 2015), well-known specialists of online gaming, have explicitly rejected adopting a logical or ontological perspective in favor of a pragmatic, sociological approach or one inspired by cultural studies. When a point of view inspired by literary studies is adopted to treat digital artifacts, it is chiefly narratology that is called upon to examine, for example, whether the sources of narrative tension were also at work in video games.

…”

« Into the Spider-Verse » : la méta-sérialité comme moteur narratif

“…Paradoxalement, dans ce film qui semble la célébrer, trop de diversité tue : ni le monde ni ceux qui le peuplent ne sauraient résister à un ébranlement ontologique aussi puissant. L'imaginaire du multivers, dans l'histoire de l'exploitation de ce motif par les genres de l'imaginaire, va clairement dans ce sens(Besson 2015) : il n'est pas « tenable », son ouverture ne saurait être que ponctuelle -dans le domaine littéraire, il donne lieu à des nouvelles30 , des romans one shot31 , des épisodes et pas d'autres32 , des clôtures déchirantes33 . L'explication de ce constat peut sembler liée autant à des problèmes narratologiques qu'à une sorte de résistance ontologique.…”

Exploratory preferences explain the human fascination for imaginary worlds in fictional stories

“…And Zelda is the best-selling video game series in the history of video games. They all have something in common: their creators developed an imaginary environment, that is, a fictional environment that does not actually exist, which is different from the real world, and that the consumers know to be partly or fully invented [1][2][3][4] . Moreover, such fictional stories with imaginary worlds appear better at building huge fan communities, as exemplified by the fact that lots of them turn into highly profitable multimedia franchises (e.g., the Wizarding World, the Marvel Cinematic Universe 1 ).…”