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This essay takes Kevin Quashie's formulation of a black world as the summons and seeding of my engagement with Barry Jenkins's filmic adaptation of James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk to speculate upon how a black world might be rendered in visual, multimedia, and cinematic arts. To do so, I reckon with the inherent dangers of black visuality, and of black publicness, within a carceral landscape saturated by ever more invasive, data-driven biometric technologies of surveillance and penal capture. My critical engagement with Jenkins attends to how his evasive and deconstructive cinematic experiments enact a mode of black poesis in line with Quashie's formulation of a black world in poetry. In so doing, they undermine the constancy (and presumed transparency) of black visuality, along with its affiliated perils in a racist carceral society. Ultimately, this essay theorizes how black visual arts innovate expressive techniques, within a visual field structured by the antiblack semiotics of epidermalization and spectacularization, to render our world in everyday, living black splendor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the anti-anthropocentric world-building in documentaries that employ aspeculative mode of inquiry and reckon with the ecological crisis. Dubbed speculative documentaries, they move beyond the Griersonian creative treatment of actuality toward a speculative treatment of subjectivity. Understanding their world-building encourages us to place the documentary within the interdisciplinary, multidimensional, and collective undertaking to address the Anthropocene and the increasing climate crisis. Slow Action (2010) imagines the evolution of species and ecosystems when isolated and surrounded by unsuitable habitats envisioning a science fiction future of island biogeography in face of extinction. Truth or Consequences (2020) considers the possible cataclysmic futurity as its present-day setting. It seeks to define the mode of speculative documentary as documentary footage placed into a fictionalized context where, as if it were science fiction, takes what is nascent today and treats it as though it is already happening. Jan Ijäs's documentary series Waste (2016-ongoing) assumes a more-than-human approach to anthropogenic habitats by expanding on the concept of waste and critiquing the devastating human effect on the earth. The results are part ethnographic, part science fiction, offering a space for contemplation on constructed and natural environments that bewail and anticipate Earth's transformation over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Angélica Gorodischer began publishing in the mid-1960s, establishing a reputation as a writer of speculative and science fiction, as well as of narratives that resist neat categorization. She has also been classified as a feminist writer and as a postcolonial writer. Across genres, Gorodischer's work foregrounds a poetics of storytelling and world-building, often through tales of voyage and discovery. Gorodischer highlights the social aspect of storytelling, implicating listeners in the narrative and offering a critical perspective on the circumstances portrayed. Gorodischer's world-building includes the invented galaxies of science fiction imagination as well as quotidian minutiae of contemporary Argentina. This essay will consider the connections among storytelling, world-building, and translation, drawing on examples from a number of Gorodischer's stories and their translations, among them my own translation of her novel in stories, Trafalgar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This scholarly paper presents an innovative conceptual framework that draws upon insights from fictional narratives to inform the evolution of the metaverse, a burgeoning digital ecosystem with transformative potential. The study examines key elements of fictional works, including world-building techniques, social interaction dynamics, narrative structures, and ethical considerations, to illuminate the complexities of designing immersive virtual environments. Our primary findings indicate that consistency and coherence in world-building significantly enhance user immersion and engagement in virtual environments. Furthermore, the integration of diverse cultural and historical elements in the metaverse can foster inclusivity and enrich user experiences. Additionally, ethical considerations, such as privacy, digital identity, and accessibility, are paramount to the development of a responsible and inclusive metaverse. These findings underscore the importance of fiction as a source of inspiration, foresight, and caution for metaverse development. The proposed framework aims to amalgamate the imaginative realms of fiction with the practical applications of virtual environments, thereby facilitating the creation of a metaverse that is engaging, inclusive, and ethically responsible.

This article addresses that there has been a shift in the field of creativity, evidenced in the socio‐cultural manifesto written in 2019. This shift invites us to rethink our focus on education. The change proposed here is a change of perspective: stop focusing on the individual and instead consider the whole picture where the individual encounters a context with others and materials to think. The individual seeks a purpose in the world that allows a point of view to emerge. World‐building proposes a similar shift when it comes to storytelling. The objective is to develop a story not around a character but imagining a world where individuals emerge. This article seeks to understand whether this particular outtake on education might be a way to foster this perspective on creativity. To answer this question, we will analyze the students' final reflections once they finish the semester. The answers belong to two different cohorts, in the year 2021 and 2022, from the Universidad Austral in Argentina. The student's responses will be analyzed using the coding method developed by Strauss and Corbin. The codes will allow us to group the main findings. Each family group will be described to understand if they are similar to what the manifesto states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through references to Xue Yiwei's (1964–) emigration to Canada, the translation of his works into English, and his repeated discussion of Western authors, the majority of critics have emphasized Xue's global outlook. However, to date, there has been relatively little discussion of the ways in which his engagement with the world has shaped his writing. This article considers how Xue Yiwei attempts to "transcend the boundaries of language" and create what he calls a "wider and stranger space for literature" against the background of a historically fraught relationship between Chinese and World literature. What does this space look like? Where can we locate it in relation to China and in relation to the world? How does Xue attempt to shape this space through his writing? This article considers these questions from three angles: Xue's repeated use of explicit intertextuality, the multilingual and polyphonic nature of his writing, and the way in which his books have circulated beyond China. Despite continuing unevenness in the global literary field, this article argues for points of creative agency in Xue Yiwei's attempt to "dialogue with the world." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rosi Braidotti's theory of "nomadic subject" (2011) has shifted the focus from traveller in the literal sense of the word to subject as a process; becoming subject entails a denial of universals in the construction of identity which is redefined as situated embodiment in the world, open to the heteronormativity of changing social codes and accepted modes of living or of conceiving otherness. Nevertheless, travel has always been associated with an explicit ethos, whether as a pious pilgrimage, educational world tour or the grand narrative of civilizing mission. Located on various maps, real or imaginary, civilizations are brought into contact by the huge number of migrants, the problems they raise including the relationship between third worlds and metropolitan cities/countries, the migrants' othering by mainstream populations, the migrants' desire to be naturalised and the estrangement from their true selves as a result. By building simulation models, speculative fiction probes deeply into underground concerns which well up to the surface in postcolonial literature, being expected to produce cognitive enlightenment. Relieved from the material deprivations of the colonial past, the postcolonial subject is now caught in the process of identitarian reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses The Autobiography of Jane Eyre (Nessa Aref and Alysson Hall's 2013–2014 transmedia adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre , hereafter AoJE) to explore the impact of characters' social media accounts on user interactivity and immersion. AoJE employs the powers of social media to create a modernized and fully-fledged storyworld, yet the users' overall experience is undermined by the very strategies meant to facilitate engaged interactivity. When social media posts become sites where users not only actively seek additional content but also 'read' traces of other users' interactions with the content, those traces function as paratextual commentary, creating dialogic metaphors. In AoJE , the characters' social media accounts demand that users remain in a near constant state of metalepsis by accepting and even inverting several previously accepted ontological binaries: character/actor, reader/writer, passive/active, immersive/interactive. The effort required by users to interact successfully with the various platforms additionally underscores the difficulty of consuming (and prosuming) a story that unfolds over multiple platforms, especially once the social media components no longer exist in the immediate present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The undertaking in this article is primarily to recall the basic meaning of enlightenment as a self‐active thinking movement. I show that enlightenment is not something to be taught, but rather the encouragement to think for yourself and, subsequently, to think anew; and this applies to the same degree to children and adults. I suggest a childist critique of enlightenment by addressing, first, enlightenment's overlooked adultist conception, giving, second, a brief practical insight into the children's polylogue, and, finally, re‐adjusting the understanding of enlightenment by referring to Hannah Arendt's considerations about world‐building and John Wall's thoughts about play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article concerns the functioning of selected collectibles in the post-apocalyptic dilogy of digital games The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013-2020). The authors make a typology of collectibles and distinguish among them props that support the gameplay, characterize the characters and extend the storyworld, referring to the prop theory proposed by Kendal Walton. They are particularly interested in the last type of props, which include notes, diaries and letters left in various places of the world presented by anonymous members of the American community. The authors indicate that these props can be treated as specific artifacts of the past, which, although not important from the gameplay perspective, perform important world-creating functions. In this context, they describe collectibles as an element of historical culture (J. Rüsen) and a source of social memory (M. Golka), and discuss their allotopic potential (U. Eco, K.M. Maj). They refer to those props that shape the history and mythology of the post-apocalyptic world, and especially to the notes describing Outbreak Day, the apogee of the pandemic disease that decimated humanity in the game. Written sources are of a personal nature - they present an individual perspective on a breakthrough moment in the history of the depicted world. For this reason, the authors refer to them as ego-props, thus extending the concept of ego-document. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speculative fiction is commonly associated with highly involved artistic world-building. Indeed, speculation itself as an artistic practice often involves creation of detailed, grand-scale imaginary scenarios that come across as worlds the reader is invited to interpret as coherent systems. By analysing such grand-scale speculation in Emmi Itäranta’s The Moonday Letters (2020/2022), I demonstrate how such focus on modelling an imaginary world makes the novel a vehicle for various kinds of grand-scale thought experiments ranging from exploration of global ethics and meditations on cosmic order to conceptual reflection on speculative world-building itself as a manner of engaging with reality. This analysis offers a view to world-building in speculative fiction as a means for going beyond the everyday scale of human life, viewing the imaginary world as a heuristic model for interpreting our own reality.

Copyright of Iskolakultúra is the property of University of Szeged, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Vampires are portrayed opposite to humans, depicted as the dichotomy between predator and prey. Being ever so near to their prey, vampires develop a proclivity for imbibing or emulating characteristics that are considered to be in the sole charge of humans. This text employed is The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas. The article will analyse Edward Weyland as a post-human symbol, positing himself as an ever-evolving entity that is both human as well as a threshold to gauge humanity of the other characters involved. The article underlines the ways in which Giorgio Agamben's concept of Anthropological Machine and Katherine Hayles's concept of Technogenesis will be used to examine Weyland and other characters as being participants in mutual evolution, tacitly affecting each other through performative actions. The article will inspect the term 'human' as more than just a reified concept, as a term that is constantly in flux and how bio-politics is immanent to the very concept of human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article Open World and Dispersed Narrative in FromSoftware's "Elden Ring" tackles a number of design issues associated with open world design in video games. Building upon Tim Ingold's discrepancy of two distinct modes of exploring the reality (wayfaring and trail-following), the author proceeds with analysing how the categories in question might have influenced the design of Elden Ring's 'The Lands Between', which is torn between two different ambitions. One is to create a high fantasy narrative in allotopia, whilst the other is to sustain the principles of procedural rhetoric typical for soulsborne games, well-known for leaning towards a dark fantasy design style both in terms of their aesthetics and narrative content. Consequently, the main goal of this analysis is to propose a potential way of avoiding such inconsequence in open world game design, which is termed here a "ludotopian dissonance". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article contains an analysis of the function of second-person narrative in selected works of science fiction. This experimental type of narrative is characterised by a tendency to blur the line between the fictional and non-fictional worlds and to strengthen the reader’s empathic attitude. As the article shows, the combination of the possibility of deepening the psychological images of fictional characters with the complication of the ontological hierarchy of worlds and undermining their stability leads to interesting effects. Among them, the most promising seems the potential for strengthening the meanings that result from the confrontation of subjective worlds with the fictional worlds, understood as arenas for the characters’ actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Japanese folklore and mythology are ever-growing components of anime (Japanese animation). Folklore-inspired anime often reflect the artistic representations surrounding creatures and phenomena (yōkai) that come from the collective isolation periods of Heian (794-1185) and Edo (1603-1868) Japan. Four reoccurring visual signifiers (fur colour, number of tails, supernatural abilities, and clothing) within anime show that yōkai characters are a symbol that emphasise the nostalgic and idealistic connection to a 'past' Japan, in contrast to the human characters. As such, these four signifiers seen in the character design construct the fictional worlds of anime in a way that reflects a passive cultural nostalgia for a pre-Westernised Japan (primarily eras from pre-1868 before Japan's rapid modernisation). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investing in different futures is an existential challenge that much research within and adjacent to Ecological Economics engages with, yet organizations that recognize this social ecological imperative have few options for funding and implementing radical transformations to the needs and well-being provisioning systems that currently exist. Ecological macroeconomic ideas and EE principles of long term well being and justice on a livable planet will be explored in the context of the housing crisis in Canada, and a rural Ontario community organization attempting to find transformative solutions to the lived, local experience of this crisis. Provisioning systems for housing, when tied to real estate markets, debt money creation, land enclosures, and financialized supply chains, contribute to capital accumulation cycles; it is hardly possible to meet our housing needs, in aggregate, without also perpetuating the form of this provisioning system. The idea presented here, that of Capital Sequestration, proposes to remove capital from markets and `invests' this capital in land trusts as an intentional transformation of financial capital into social and ecological values. Through land and housing trusts as well as non-market funding pathways, Capital Sequestration is a method of investing in the transformation of provisioning systems through the sustained and collective boundary management of financial markets and incommensurable values. This practice offers significant promise as it applies ecological macroeconomic theory work, is grounded in the normative goals of and emerges from empirical research of EE, and meets a pressing need within society for imagining alternative economies.

Copyright of Theoretical Studies of Literature & Art / Wenyi Lilun Yanjiu is the property of Editorial Board of Theoretical Studies in Literature & Art and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article is a reflective analysis of an assignment in which undergraduate students developed dystopian, postapocalyptic, fantasy, and fictional short story parables to illustrate their understanding of sociological theory. In a social theory course, students were assigned a final paper in which they designed a short story that integrated sociological theory, including classical and contemporary concepts, which were applied to these fictional worlds. The assignment encouraged students to develop both macro- and micro-level creative social theory analysis using a fictional society that often touches on the themes of futurism, science fiction, or postapocalyptic settings. These scenarios allowed students to engage in world-building linked to systems of oppression that were analyzed through various perspectives, including Marxist theories, critical race theory, and feminist theories. The assignment is a creative way for students to apply their sociological imagination with the world-building process for an in-depth understanding of sociological theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many pathways to post-fossil futures have been articulated, most fail to engage people in imagining themselves as being part of those futures and involved in the transition. Following recent calls for more immersive experiences, the 2019 initiative “Carbon Ruins—An Exhibition of the Fossil Era” (Carbon Ruins) is a performance set around a historical museum from the future, which uses recognisable, culturally powerful physical objects to bridge the gap between abstract scenarios and everyday experiences. Through its physical presence and extensive media coverage, Carbon Ruins struck a chord with scientists, activists, creative professionals, policy makers, civil society organisations, and the general public. Like other imaginary worlds, Carbon Ruins is not finished. It is an open-ended process of narrating, imagining, and representing (the transition to) a post-fossil future. In this article we reflect upon Carbon Ruins as a participatory form of world-building that allows for new ways of knowing, and new ways of being, in relation to post-fossil transitions. We discern three different kinds of authorship that were taken on by participants: as originators, dwellers, and explorers. While the originator makes the future world a recognisable place, the dweller can engage active hope in place of a passive sense of urgency, and the explorer can transform resignation into commitment, with a fresh determination to leave the fossil era behind. Situating Carbon Ruins within a critical political tradition, we find post-fossil world-building to be a form of critique that destabilises accustomed ways of thinking and opens up new fields of experience that allows things to be done differently.

This essay presents the Recherche's narrator as an expert in a world of experts. Considering previous scholarship on the sociological knowledge present in Proust's novel, I imagine the pursuit of this knowledge as characterizing its narrator, distinguishing him from the other specialists who populate the pages of his récit. Drawing on the work of Gil Eyal, I read this récit as displaying a marked attention to the 'networks of expertise' in which these other experts make their knowledge effective. The récit's language, meanwhile, provides information on the network of expertise in which the narrator himself must operate to assume the social position of expert. Ultimately, I argue that thinking about the narrator and his writing in terms of expertise allows us to ironize the narrator's knowledge about the social world. From this ironic distance, the Recherche becomes not a vehicle of such knowledge but an experience of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The modern videogame industry is a massive economic and social engine. Much like the creation of a film, making a videogame requires a highly coordinated team of moving parts, with significant front-end costs. As such, to move units, all the artistic components need to be perfect to create a compelling world that demands continued engagement and brand loyalty. This article elucidates the specific essential role of the voice actor in the world building process, outlines how the voice is central to the immersive gaming experience, and critically assess the vocal tools used by practicing professionals for some of the leading games of the last decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes and discusses the term of 'ludotopian dissonance' in reference to flawed open-world design in computer role-playing games (cRPGs). Much like ludonarrative dissonance, this concept shall address a paradox of narrative credibility – this time, however, narrowed to the gameworld itself rather than to gameplay or storyline. This case study of Cyberpunk 2077's world-building is supplemented with reflection upon the idea of openness or 'openworldlness' ('what makes a given imaginary world truly open? Is it possible? Or is it viable for video games?'), as well as with research on explorable imaginary worlds (predominantly from the angle of transmedial narratology and interdisciplinary world-building studies). The aim of the article is to reiterate the necessity of design worlds that do not only serve as a container for storytelling, but also provide the players with an inhabitable, performative ludotopia which does not produce any dissonances between the credible storyworld and incredulous gameworld. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between the fantasy genre and the medium of computer games has always been a very tight-knit one. The present article explores the close connection between fantasy and computer games through different media, arguing that the fantasy genre's specific ‘mode of function’ is the ability to build complete fictional worlds, whereby it creates specific experiences for its users. Based on empirical data from focus group interviews with players of the most popular Western Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) of all times, World of Warcraft, the article develops the concept of worldness as an experiential, phenomenological understanding of player experience. I discuss how this way of framing a core quality of the fantasy genre (of world-building) functions across single fictional universes and aims to grasp a specific fantasy experience of being in the world. This experience works on the level of genre, by anchoring the specific fantasy world in the larger, surrounding fantasy genre matrix.

Immaginare e costruire nuovi ‘mondi’ è da sempre uno dei desideri più profondi dell’uomo. L’insaziabile fame del genio creatore caratterizza, ieri come oggi, l’attività poietica di certi artisti ed architetti. Essi guardano al mondo in maniera immaginifica per dar vita a inediti brani di realtà (o di irrealtà): così, ragione e immaginazione interagiscono liberamente nella mente artistica, scomponendo e ricomponendo frammenti di architetture e paesaggi – urbani e naturali – in nuove visioni. La storia dell’arte è costellata di esempi di artisti visionari che hanno dedicato gran parte della loro produzione alla rappresentazione visionaria di luoghi, dalle scenografie barocche dei Galli da Bibiena, passando per Piranesi e i maestri del capriccio, fino ad arrivare alle futuristiche visioni di Sant’Elia e Chernikhov. Oggi ritroviamo analoghe sperimentazioni nel lavoro degli environment concept artist attivi nell’industria dell’intrattenimento, i quali costruiscono figurazioni di universi immaginari dotate di forte potenza comunicativa e suggestiva, in cui coesistono realtà e immaginazione. Questi ‘visionari della contemporaneità’ guardano oltre il visibile, attingendo a memoria e fantasia, restituendo immagini di luoghi d’invenzione tanto coerenti e realistici da apparire possibili agli occhi dello spettatore.

This article reads with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabe writer and independent scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Nêhiyaw legal scholar and novelist Tracey Lindberg. The practice of reading with involves heeding textual instructions and prioritising narrative terms of engagement. Indigenous bodies layered with resurgent potential in Lindberg's and Simpson's fictions refuse to re-centre the legacy of white settler coloniality. Attending to the process of reading with, as a relational undertaking, involves re-apprising cross-generational legacies and re-membering collective responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference of human beings known as the Anthropocene Working Group has the power to name the next phase of Earth's geological calendar. In response, the artistic research project Epoch Wars by Pony Express calls for a mobilization of creative practice to redefine the terms on which we negotiate naming the future. Breaking the binary between science and storytelling, Epoch Wars is a body of experimental performance and digital work that advocates for the world-building power of collective decision-making in both deep and shallow time. This document outlines the making of this project, as indexed to the debate around what to name Earth's present epoch of geological time. It begins by examining the history of this debate and the role of artists within it, before introducing the world of the artwork Epoch Wars by Pony Express through a description of key research experiments and outcomes. Provisional findings of the project are discussed, offered as operating principles for possible alternate future conceptualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that history is a large-scale transmedia project that is not understood as such, and this causes friction when history is engaged with through media in which historical research is not usually presented. To do this, I go through Henry Jenkins' ten-step definition of transmedia and argue that history matches the definition very well. This transmedia discussion brings forth the concept of 'world-building', in which narrative is superseded by world-building as the all-encompassing concept and as the beginning point of analysis. In the analysis, history (as a product of historiography) is treated as phenomenon instead of a discipline and compared to other forms of transmedia world-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities have long been associated with precarity. This link seems to have intensified under contemporary global regimes of capitalism, with both popular and academic discourses noting the risks that come with building and inhabiting urban environments. The introduction to this special issue reflects on the various ways in which anthropology has engaged with the relationship between "urbanity" and "precarity." It argues that current work on precarity either favors the experiences of the Global North or sidelines the urban dimension. Studies that overcome these obstacles, moreover, are largely crystalizing around discussions of infrastructure and securitization. We offer the notion of "urban precarity" as a call for ethnography that cross‐germinates developments in urban studies with those made in our understanding of precarity. By foregrounding the urban, the ethnography collated here suggests that in the cities of late capitalism, precarity emerges as a multifaceted condition, encapsulating not only legal and economic deprivation but also moral, spiritual, political, and health‐related uncertainties. As the protagonists of our ethnography struggle to deal with the many threats bearing down upon them, precarity is also revealed as a condition conducive to world‐building and social transformation, although such forms of creative agency are highly experimental and liable to backfire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne is the property of Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Slaskiego and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we compare the languages each of the authors invented as prehistoric languages for popular culture media. Schreyer's language, Beama, was created for the film Alpha (2018), while Adger's language, Tan!aa Kawawa ki, was created for a television series on how early hominins spread throughout the world (the series was green-lit but then cancelled). We argue that though this creative process may seem far removed from classical research paradigms on language evolution, it can provide some insight into how disparate research on the possible properties of prehistoric languages can be brought together to illustrate how these languages might have worked as whole linguistic systems within these imagined worlds, as well as in prehistory. This article is part of the theme issue 'Reconstructing prehistoric languages'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many pathways to post-fossil futures have been articulated, most fail to engage people in imagining themselves as being part of those futures and involved in the transition. Following recent calls for more immersive experiences, the 2019 initiative "Carbon Ruins--An Exhibition of the Fossil Era" (Carbon Ruins) is a performance set around a historical museum from the future, which uses recognisable, culturally powerful physical objects to bridge the gap between abstract scenarios and everyday experiences. Through its physical presence and extensive media coverage, Carbon Ruins struck a chord with scientists, activists, creative professionals, policy makers, civil society organisations, and the general public. Like other imaginary worlds, Carbon Ruins is not finished. It is an open-ended process of narrating, imagining, and representing (the transition to) a post-fossil future. In this article we reflect upon Carbon Ruins as a participatory form of world-building that allows for new ways of knowing, and new ways of being, in relation to post-fossil transitions. We discern three different kinds of authorship that were taken on by participants: as originators, dwellers, and explorers. While the originator makes the future world a recognisable place, the dweller can engage active hope in place of a passive sense of urgency, and the explorer can transform resignation into commitment, with a fresh determination to leave the fossil era behind. Situating Carbon Ruins within a critical political tradition, we find post-fossil world-building to be a form of critique that destabilises accustomed ways of thinking and opens up new fields of experience that allows things to be done differently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In keeping with the purpose of the Mythopoeic Society—“promoting the study, discussion, and enjoyment of fantastic and mythic literature”—this selective list examines a few of the authors and works Ursula K. Le Guin acknowledged as being influential or among her favorites, and to which some connections might be traced in her own mythopoeic and cosmopoeic works. The list includes Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Lord Dunsany’s A Dreamer’s Tales, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An article in which two teaching assistants and six students of a university course taught inside a correctional facility, "Writing as Activism," collaboratively examine their experience as co-teachers and co-learners in a humanities-based prison classroom. Fostered and framed by their instructor’s critical and transformative pedagogical approaches in this course, the authors locate integrated learning and collaborative writing within carceral classrooms as sites for intentional and resistant futures to be enacted and embodied as a practice of post-carceral world-building. The students enter their individual narratives into this location of their experience of envisioning and enacting resistant futures together in this space as a student movement dedicated and equipped to bring a world beyond prison into being.

The article On the structure of gameworld in narrative video games proposes to introduce the term 'ludotopia' to Polish game studies in order to further compartmentalise the structure of video gameworld. Having reflected on the consequences of so-called world-centered turn in contemporary digital humanities, the author proceeds to defining archetypal structures that compose realities designed for the purposes of narrative video games, namely: locations and clusters of locations, the latter divided further into biomes and anthromes. The hierarchy introduced thereby is presented as an alternative for already influential (though, arguably, in transmedial world-building studies rather than game studies) trichotomy of mythos, topos, and ethos, as defined by Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca. In the end, the article cross-references the new structural hierarchy of ludotopographical components with a matrix of popular fantastic settings, seeking to delineate possible similarities between ludotopias and allotopias that would inform both game scholars and game designers on the ways of rapid prototyping of aesthetically diverse imaginary worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay presents an overview of the possible meanings and applications of the newly-coined term 'ludotopia', i.e. a "dialectical entanglement of game and space" -- which challenges the boundaries of two neighbouring worlds: storyworld and gameworld. Seeking to trace the limitations of a thus defined gaming space, the author proceeds by reflecting upon the end of the game, or, more precisely, the endgame, in order to reconcile it with a notion of horismós (oρισμoς) popular in more hermeneutically aligned video game studies. While doing so, the paper delivers an analysis of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey showing three distinct stages in which a ludotopia can be opened towards more advanced world-building: (1) exploration and map reveal; (2) synchronisation of intelligible tags; and (3) renewal of narrative motivation. Thanks to a world-centered approach to the interpreted video game, the essay addresses how players inhabit, traverse, explore, and understand the surrounding ludic reality, rather than focusing on video game mechanics or procedures that affect their gameplay. In the end, a precise distinction between the storyworld and gameworld is introduced in order to reevaluate the ways both terms overlap with the aforementioned interpretation of ludotopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This essay reads Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen (1957) alongside Sigmund Freud's case history of paranoia, The Schreber Case (1911), two texts about 18th- and 19th-century personalities caught up in the gender and ethnic politics of their times. Noting affinities between the fantasies documented in Varnhagen's and Schreber's memoirs, I compare Seyla Benhabib's and Eric Santner's readings of these two texts as political, not psychological, documents. I propose a reading of paranoia positioned between Benhabib's too optimistic dismissal of paranoia and Santner's too tragic approach. The result is a new reading of Varnhagen's story and an approach to paranoia as a potentially promising political affect. Might paranoia stand not just for worldwithdrawal but also for world-building? If so, this would be in keeping with Arendt's own treatment of her subject"s persecution fantasies not only as a "verdict against the world" but also as a desire for a world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 21st century, world-building has become more visible as imaginary worlds move into mainstream entertainment, leading to an exciting and emerging field of worldbuilding studies. The purpose of this study is to explore the imaginary world of The Little Prince novella, a significant literary work by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, through its nonnarrative structures and its narrative. The entire text was extracted for data collection and analysis. The types of secondary world infrastructures identified were space, time, characters, nature, culture, language and philosophy. These infrastructures were found to form the imaginary world by constituting its locations, temporality, populations, materiality, customs, mode of communication and truths. The physical events and the mental events of the dynamic component of the storyworld were found to form the world through the progression of the narrative in the wide frames of past and present, as well as through the narrow frame. This study has implications for the type of works examined and the method employed in world-building studies, as well as for creative writing, content creation and literature education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Told through a series of interrelated documents (including emails, text messages, newspaper clippings and blog posts), Annabel Smith's interactive digital novel The Ark epitomises the contemporary hybridity of the dystopian genre. Designed to be fully immersive, the story can be engaged with across media, enabling readers to 'dive deeper into the world of the novel' and challenge how they experience dystopian texts. Taking a Text World Theory perspective, I examine the implications of this challenge, investigating the impact of transmedial storytelling on world-building and exploring the creative evolution of dystopian epistolary more broadly. In analysing both the ebook element of The Ark and certain facets of its companion pieces (which take the form of a dynamic website and a smartphone app), I investigate the creation of the novel's text-worlds, considering the process of multimodal meaning construction, examining the conceptual intricacies of the epistolary form and exploring the influence of paratextual matter on world-building and construal. In doing so, I offer new insights into the conceptualisation of 'empty text-worlds', extend Gibbons' discussions of transmedial world-creation and argue for a more nuanced understanding of dystopian epistolary as framed within Text World Theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dominant turn towards transmediality across the contemporary media industries has brought a range of emerging digital innovations and new possibilities for telling stories, be it in interactive television experiences, apps, social media, and so on. Despite such rich possibilities, the transmedia phenomenon has also arguably led to a kind of indirect flattening out of how we now understand different media forms, platforms, stories, and even characters. This article will explore the character-building practices that have been employed in augmenting the televisual experience of The walking dead (2010–present) across platforms. It looks at The walking dead: Red machete (2017–2018), a six-part webisode series available on AMC's website, the AMC Story Sync facility (2012–present), a double-screen application designed to enable audiences to post live comments about the episodes, respond to surveys, and talk to other audiences via a chat platform, and finally AMC's Talking dead (2011–present), a 30-minute accompanying talk show. I demonstrate how these three examples of what I call augmented television draw on sociological and anthropological notions of communication, modern social life, and environment in ways that present chances for what I call sociological character-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a select transcript from a moderated panel titled "Making Worlds in the Pluriverse" held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article offers an analysis on how comics authors can employ architecture as a narrative trope, by focusing on the works of Tsutomu Nihei (Blame!, Sidonia no Kishi), and the duo of Francois Schuiten and Benoit Peeters (Le cités obscures). The article investigates how these authors use architectural tropes to create speculative fictions that develop renditions of cities as complex narrative environments, and “places” with a distinctive role and profile in stories. It is argued that these authors exploit the multimodal nature of comics and the potential of architecture to construct complex worlds and narrative structures.

This article aims at reworking the notion of « interwoven storytelling » (Breda, 2015) by developing new theoretical propositions to analyze complex TV series. More precisely, we will question the contribution of this narratological approach in order to study the televisual adaptation of a science fiction novel. We chose the example of The Man in the High Castle (Amazon, 2015-), based on a novel by Philip K. Dick (1962).Switching from a short narrative to a longer and serialized format enables, in this case study, to apply a « narrative lining ». This new textile metaphor is supported by the means of diagrams inspired by the sociological graph theory, giving flesh to the multiplication of connections between characters and storylines over a long period.The narrative expansion through seriality participates in a world-building activity, creating a whole fictional world, both « populated » and geographically all over the place. The fact that The Man in the High Castle belongs to an « imagination culture » and to the uchronia genre enables, on top of it all, to move from a « possible world » to a multiverse, adding yet another lining layer to the complex storytelling.

In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-building of political activism. We reflect on a particular encounter between the artists and ACT UP activists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz by offering two readings of what we call the "counterprivate" relation between the two. In the first part of our argument, we contend that the counterprivate couple form (found in our case study of Leonard and Wojnarowicz) occasions a space of provisional leave from the normative affective, aesthetic, and identity-based impulses which tend to emerge in social movement group formation. Despite established critiques of the private, dyadic intimacy of the couple within social movement theory and queer and feminist cultural studies, we highlight the value of counterprivate couples – not in place of the collective world-building that is made possible by political organizing and collective identity, but as a necessary aesthetic complement to collective, participatory politics. In the second part of our argument, we read the intimacy between Leonard and Wojnarowicz as a private moment of expressed doubt that has subsequently been institutionalized into a public discourse through the context of art. Here the counterprivate couple form in turn becomes a counterpublic mode of collective world-making once more. This transformation from counterprivate relation to public discourse occasions a practice of collective subject formation (in the institutional terrain of art) that affirms doubt, curiosity, and poetic beauty as part of the reproductive labor involved in political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering narrative as a communicative act implies that all interlocutors in this act take an active role. From this rhetorical stance, reading has always been a co-constructed world-building exercise: the audience, as much as the author, builds a storyworld as conveyed by the narrative. This article employs critical apparatuses that foreground this collaborative nature of narrative communication to illuminate its collaborative world-building processes. Thus, by focusing on these aspects of narrative communication, we here begin responding to Paul Dawson’s and James Phelan’s invitations toward a multi-directional narrative communication model approach. To illustrate this approach’s utility, we explicate readers’ co-constructions of the storyworlds and the actual world in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012). Attending to world-building processes in, about, and around the novel of our case study, we call attention to how the rhetorical resources used to construct the storyworld are not limited to the physical space of the book and, in fact, often cross into the actual world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current narrative environment sees as protagonists of the production and distribution of content, important franchises, able to colonize the imaginary built on media representations, saturating also the conversations on social media. Think, for example, of memes, videos and UGC that have as a reference such narrative universes. In this context, it is possible to note a structural transformation of the original concept of transmedia (Jenkins 2006), in function of two variables: the circulation of stories through different media, the multiplication of the possibilities of creation and diffusion of the narrative universe by users (Scolari 2013). Such a scenario determines a new balance between producers and consumers, in relation to the dynamics of access to the fruition of the storyworld (Ryan 2014), by virtue of a multiple authorship (Wolf 2014) and a non-sequential narrative (macro-history, interstitial stories, parallel stories, peripheral stories, UGC). In the light of these changes, the paper proposes a reflection on the distribution of transmedia content through screen-based media, privileged points of entry of the narrative, thanks to its intrinsic characteristics (Lipovetsky and Serroy 2011). In particular, the case study "Star Wars", a paradigmatic example of classical transmediality and, at the same time, of evolved transmediality, is explored in depth. Through an analysis of the different productions activated starting from the acquisition of the brand by Disney, a specific parallelism between narration and screen emerges: macro-history produced for cinema, interstitial stories for cinema and television, parallel productions for television and videogames (consoles), peripheral stories for video, social platforms and videogames (consoles and apps). The analysis returns the dimension of a transmedia cultural interface (Manovich 2001) built by screens, which stands as a continuum between the immersive experience of cinema, of collective nature, and the interactive and participatory dimension given by mobile devices, of individual nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay proposes a set of terms for considering serial narratives across media, by focusing on the defining quality of seriality: the rhythmic, compositional, and sequential relationship between one object and a subsequent, apparently similar object. The six terms—iteration, multiplicity, momentum, world-building, personnel, and design—address the methods by which serial installments relate to one another, and build stories, environments, and expectations over time. These elements operate not as necessities but as options for enunciating the structures and experiences that serials provide for their audiences; some serials may choose to minimize or work against these elements. Drawing on examples from television, the novel, cinema, podcasts, and comics, the argument makes a case for the centrality of a collection of characteristics that together articulate the narrative strategies that installment-publication continues to privilege. Serials that resist these six elements most persistently represent examples of "minimalist seriality"; serials that embrace them most robustly represent examples of "maximalist seriality." The essay concludes with the broader claim that all serials, whatever their era or context, essentially contain both "Victorian" and "Modernist" energies—the interplay between a sustained, immersive, imaginative investment and the interruptive, fragmented effect of distinct installments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imaginary worlds and how they are constructed are central to fiction. The term world-building, however, has been applied so broadly in scholarship that it has become ambiguous and difficult to use in critical discussions. Aiming to contribute to greater clarity in the critical use of the term, this article introduces the concept of critical world-building. This is distinguished from other types of world-building, such as that performed by an author or reader, mainly by the fact that a critic analyses a world through a combination of their sequential presentation, as complete world, and with critical interpretation and theoretical filters in place, applying all three perspectives simultaneously. Two possible approaches to critical world-building are presented, based on the functions of a world’s building-blocks and how to interpret those functions. The first approach focuses on a world’s “architecture” – its structural and aesthetic system of places – and the form, function, and meaning of those places. The second emphasises the dynamic interplay between building-blocks and their interconnections in a web of explicit, implied, and interpreted information about the world. The authors base their discussion on textual, secondary fantasy worlds but invite applications of critical world-building to other genres and media.

Objective: to analyze the dependence of world-building (oico-nomics) on the formation of the European worldview, to comprehend the role of elites and social mentality in the world-building process and in relation to the formation of the Russian reality and its current state. Methods: an integrated approach to the analysis determined the range of specific research methods: systemic and value analysis from the standpoint of geo-economics, geo-culture and geo-anthropology, hermeneutic comparative analysis, philosophical reasoning. Results: the paper substantiates the critical role of elites and knowledge systems in the genesis of the complicated organization of the society; the features of world-building practices in Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox mentality are defined; the role of geo-economics as a relevant concept for the analysis of global processes, and Russian reality, is highlighted. Scientific novelty: the article considers the specifics of Russia's destiny as a continental geo-economic space, introduces into scientific circulation the concept of geoanthropology to determine the role of anthropological factor in the totality of processes and situations that arise in the allocation and reallocation of human resources on the planet with regard to their quality characteristics. Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the research are relevant to the scientific research and pedagogical work, as well as for the development of the methodology of the Social Sciences and Humanities. It is of interest when considering the prospects of Russia's development in the challenging circumstances of the 21 century.