World construction and meaning production in the “impossible worlds” of literature

Abstract

I examine the implications for literary semantics of the distinction introduced by possible-world literary theorists between world construction and meaning production. I argue that the interdisciplinary borrowings from modal logic have resulted in a tendency among the literary scholars in the field to give preference to the referential dimension of fictional texts over their meaning component. As a direct consequence, the “impossibility” of certain fictional worlds has been diagnosed and assessed in terms of a referential failure. However, although the option to focus on the referential impossibility of some fictional worlds is clearly available to the literary theorist, it may lead to a rather one-sided approach, unless it is counterbalanced by an interest in meaning production in the case of (for the specific purposes of this article) logically inconsistent and/or self-disclosing narratives.