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Abstract
This dissertation proposes a set of interpretive possibilities afforded by the privileging of fictional worlds as a site of primary analysis, particularly in 20th and 21st century American mass culture. Fictional worlds are more than a mental map or a network of facts; they are entities created or initiated by human imagination but then filled in by the semi-autonomous processes of implication, closure, and improvisation. By adapting theories about fictional worlds from narratology and metafictional modal philosophy and integrating these concepts with more traditional narratological and cultural analysis, I propose an interpretive method taking fictional worlds themselves as aesthetic objects which follow their own premises and offer their own insights. I "read" fictional worlds by tracking their internal consistency, genre-coded assumptions, ontological rules, and the ways in which they invite audience participation or hermeneutic labor. I also attend closely to the material and cultural conditions of their production—particularly within franchises, serialized media, and transmedia networks—looking for the ways in which ideas or points-of-view enter into fictional worlds as laws of nature. Such a method is more in line with the ways in which the everyday consumer encounters contemporary media, an environment in which every object must potentially be placed in a much larger narrative framework. I develop this argument over the course of three chapters. In the first chapter, I look at the economic and aesthetic function of fictional worlds for today’s massive media franchises. The rise of aesthetic interest in worlds may be the result of cultural trends, but the multibillion-dollar franchises that have filled up our movie theaters and streaming services in the past ten years have adapted the fictional world into a gimmick and labor-saving technology. From here, my second chapter singles out the fictional world formed by the accrued output of DC Comics—the first transmedia "multiverse.” DC’s narrative world is the product of tens of thousands of individual text objects collaboratively generated by innumerable human hands, but its size, open-endedness, and long timeline creates an excess of narrative, heaped so densely on top of itself that it has developed an inescapable gravitational pull. In my third chapter I assemble case studies in which the creation of a self-contained “world” is narrativized: where the world, its conditions, and its creator may be interrogated. These stories, however, are not metafictions; they do not look out of the page to challenge us as we read. Only when the world and its creator are integrated into the narrative can the characters in a story truly “talk back” to their conditions on terms of ontological equality and stage a meaningful allegorical debate about the ethics of worldmaking. Life in Contemporary Fictional Worlds tries to root out some of the operations of a kind of literalism in contemporary culture, where stories have come to seem almost as real as the real world. The fictional characters sliding across our many screens can feel more real than the lives of those immediately around us, or even the material conditions driving our own experiences. Our world has become too vast to grasp, too diffuse to hold in our minds, too systems-driven to rail against. Fictional worlds are a comfort: a comforting, comprehensible world that one can rent, invent, or buy.