Fanfan Chen

This essay explores the Chinese imagination and “logic” that construct both literal and figurative ways of ascending to heaven from the mythic or imaginary facts to the pragmatic and spiritual practice. Many Taoist philosophers and alchemists draw on figurative language and allegories to demonstrate abstract notions and wisdom. This figurative mediation is reminiscent of Plato’s approach in staging Socrates as a “teller of myth”. The present study thus resorts to the theory of the imaginary to better illuminate the underlying symbolism and the universal imaginary in Chinese texts and thought. The Taoist imagination of celestial ascension evolves from the mythic figures, to the rhetorical figures of metaphysics, through to theoretical and literary alchemy. This imaginary actualization is possible through the spatial and temporal passages offered by mountain caves and animal rides.

The diversity of contemporary French narration renders the canonical definition of le fantastique useless. Writers challenge Todorov’s definition that the fantastic emerges as the reader hesitates between the supernatural and the natural explanation for the unlikely event. Léa Silhol (1967), a storyteller of mythic-poetic-fantastic style, figures among these writers. An inheritor of romantic fantastic storytelling, Silhol delves into the mental and psychic depth of legendary figures, mostly goddesses and fairies, to make them question their own identity and observe humans from their perspective. Her feminine and universal writing about the fantastic exemplifies the new-generation French fantastic. Like the mythic tisseuse in her tales, Silhol weaves stories with a new texture, with an imaginary étoffe. Just as the mythic and legendary weavers are associated with water, she makes use of it to achieve her verbal alchemy, the narrative rhetoric of which operates from three angles: myth...

Résumé Cet article essaie de mettre en lumière la présence occulte du mysticisme oriental dans les récits de Julio Cortázar, lieux d’un équilibre délicat entre la littérature et le sentiment vécu de frisson fantastique. Pour commencer, je propose une vue générale sur le fantastique, le mysticisme et Cortázar. Je propose ensuite une exploration sur la structure formelle et spirituelle de trois schèmes avec l’hypersensibilité qui conduit au « non-je ». Enfin, je proposerai une lecture de l’absence de causalité logique qui débouche sur une rhétorique mystique et donne forme à l’écriture fantastique de Cortázar.

Formalist definitions of the fantastic in literature, such as the well-known one by Zvetan Todorov, overlook the historical and cultural variants of the genre. Fantastic stories from different cultures represent the unlikely, the invisible, or the supernatural phenomena (such as dragons and ghosts) in similar ways, which suggests that the fantastic is universal but conceived differently in different cultures and epochs. Fantastic literature can be defined as poeticized storytelling about the imaginary of the unknown. Yet the unknown today may be known tomorrow. As the Chinese writer Lao Zi remarks: “The unknown is the commencement of all becoming; the known is the mother of all becoming.” Owen Barfield's theory of the evolution of consciousness, and Goethe's view of the evolution of the human mind, can be used for a new periodization of the genre, that divides the poetic renderings of the fantastic into four stages.

This paper attempts to frame a hermeneutic narratology of interactive digital storytelling in light of Paul Ricoeur's philosophy and the narratology of the French New Rhetoric. For starters, I propose to bring to light an underlying rationale to demonstrate the significance of interactive storytelling in videogames that go beyond entertainment. This rationale rejoins the perennial ontological and epistemological questions. I will then analyze how the threefold mimesis functions par excellence in interactive storytelling. Lastly, my theoretical framing will be completed with the praxis dimension of mimesis, a discussion of semiotic and morphological orientation for emplotment, for future digital poiesis.