A Multiverse of Narratives: Possible Worlds Theory and Authorship from the Lone Artist to Corporate Authors
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A MULTIVERSE OF NARRATIVES: POSSIBLE WORLDS THEORY AND AUTHORSHIP FROM THE LONE ARTIST TO CORPORATE AUTHORS By Gary Gravely A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Middle Tennessee State University August 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. David Lavery, Chair Dr. Peter McCluskey Dr. Mischa Renfroe I dedicate this research project to my parents. Without them, graduate school would not have been possible. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my parents, Richard and Jo Ann Gravely, and Laura Zuehsow for not allowing me to give up and quit throughout this stressful process. They have been my rocks to lean on when the stress and uncertainty became too much to bear alone. I have also had many friends, both inside and outside of academia, who have provided camaraderie as I have proceeded down this journey. I would especially like to thank Sarah Crotzer whose role as academic friend has been invaluable when the perspective of an academic peer has been desperately needed. Additionally, the many various teachers and mentors who have also helped me along this way are too many to count but have all been vitally important in helping me reach this goal. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. David Lavery, Dr. Mischa Renfroe, and Dr. Peter McCluskey for helping me to finally complete my goal. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation utilizes the narratological concept of possible worlds theory to examine the spectrum of authorship by exploring how the theory can help us to understand the crafting of literary worlds as we have seen them evolve from William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County to the fantastical worlds found within the realm of today’s popular culture. The major scholarship of PWT establishes a framework to examine a plethora of texts across various media and to see how PWT has been a great tool in narrative creation along the spectrum of authorship from the lone author artist to corporate entities. Many aspects of narrative supply the world-building actions at the heart of PWT allowing authors to create the worlds which give stories their ultimate complexity. Once one central world has become ontologically intricate, it then permits the author of the narrative, and any others who might come later, to journey into tangential worlds. In the first chapter, Umberto Eco’s The Role of the Reader, and particularly the essay “Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text” along with other essays on prominent popular fiction narratives, serves as a launching point in PWT criticism. In the second chapter, William Faulkner and his nine novels set in his fictional creation of Yoknapatawpha County serve as an example of PWT applied to a narrative realm created and built by one author. My third chapter looks at how narrative worlds expand and need the concept of possible worlds in pop culture texts as I move the analysis to licensed properties like Star Wars and Harry Potter where other authors have continued narratives both officially and unofficially. In the fourth chapter, television showrunners and their iv writers become the focus by looking at dramatic television from The Twilight Zone and Hill Street Blues to the shows of the present. The superhero universes of DC and Marvel Comics are then examined as the ultimate example of possible worlds being used to continue a narrative over many years and writers by looking at the medium’s version of the epic in works like Crisis on Infinite Earths. Ultimately, this dissertation explores a multitude of narratives and generates the possibilities for boundless more research due to the infinite potential worlds that might narratively spring from any text. The mechanism of PWT has allowed our pop culture to navigate complex narratives where the characters find their stories being created in multiple media by hundreds of creators as corporations rather than authors drive story production. PWT allows the narratives to thrive rather than confuse as the narratives exist not just in world generated from narrative print but a plethora of media platforms from comics to television and movies to video games and new media. This dissertation demonstrates how PWT allows multiple narratives to coexist without questioning the validity of a story as it jumps from platform to platform. v TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER ONE: POSSIBLE WORLDS THEORY ……………………………... 1 CHAPTER TWO: FAULKNER’S WORLD: YOKNAPATAWPHA……………. 65 CHAPTER THREE: SOLE OWNERSHIP OF WORLDS VERSUS FANFICS AND EXPANDED UNIVERSES …………………………………….. 122 CHAPTER FOUR: TELEVISION AND POSSIBLE WORLDS: SHOWRUNNERS AND WRITERS……………………………………………..... 164 CHAPTER FIVE: COMICS AND MULTIVERSES: POSSIBLE WORLDS AND CORPORATE AUTHORSHIP……………………………………………… 208 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………….. 235 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………… 242 vi 1 CHAPTER ONE Possible Worlds Theory The narrative theory of possible worlds provides a useful tool for application to a variety of texts across many different media. The utility of this narrative theory serves as the impetus of this dissertation as possible worlds theory (hereafter referred to as PWT) demonstrates a spectrum from which to observe the link between narrative world- building and authorship. This dissertation examines how PWT can be used from first studying how one author can generate a central world for the various narratives of his fictional oeuvre to later looking at how today’s pop culture texts can generate a world ontologically complete from the imagination of a central auteur held in continuity by PWT even after others contribute to the narrative’s evolution. The alternative narratives provided by PWT become even more essential in a postmodern era where multiple voices narrate each individual world that readers (or viewers) find themselves immersed within. The first chapter of this dissertation provides a history of major theorists and their works related to PWT. From how truth in fiction can be defined to how a central model world can generate other peripheral possible worlds, various theoretical concepts introduced to narrative theory via the mechanism of PWT are described in this chapter. The implications of these concepts, to be discussed in later chapters, will be highlighted within the overall development of PWT. William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County will be the focus of the second chapter. Faulkner’s novels deserve attention from PWT due to the unique position of the Yoknapatawpha narrative within American fiction. For this dissertation, Faulkner’s work serves the essential purpose of a single author developing a complex narrative world as 2 the place of origin for most of his noteworthy fiction. While Faulkner is far from the first writer to place much of his fiction within a specific fictional geographic location, the particular moment of his location within the shift from modernism to postmodernism along with the zeal with which he continued to return to Yoknapatawpha and the utility of that place to convey a particular pivotal scene in American history and literature make Faulkner’s fiction ideal for a PWT examination. Faulkner’s narrative generated a world serving as laboratory to artistically demonstrate the divergent shifts in the human, American, and Southern experience occurring during his lifetime. Before a true appreciation of the possibility inherent in fiction via PWT can occur, an understanding of how a fictional world may be ontologically formed in narrative across various works needs to occur. The second chapter of this dissertation examines this world generation and analyzes how Yoknapatawpha County reflects both the universal and local aspects of the human experience. Throughout the nine major novels of Yoknapatawpha, PWT’s world-building aspects provide a unique paradigm of how Faulkner used his fictional Mississippi county to highlight the issues of actual Mississippi. He depicted Mississippi’s struggles with Civil War defeat, attempts to mythologize a Lost Cause, the introduction of the modern world via technologies like the automobile, and the advent of postmodernism. Licensed properties, specifically Star Wars and Harry Potter, are the focus of the third chapter as the PWT analysis moves from the literature of Faulkner to more pop culture-oriented texts. Star Wars and Harry Potter are appropriate subjects for this particular chapter due to their existence as narrative universes that began from the imaginations of individual minds but have since evolved with the contributions of many 3 others to the urtext of the original visionary. Because of the approximate two decade head start, Star Wars receives the bulk of the scrutiny in this chapter because the saga of the original film trilogy quickly moved beyond the media of film and was corporately licensed so that Lucas’s narrative could be extended by others into media of comics, cartoons, novels, video games, and various others. This expansion of the narrative becomes even more important due to the recent acquisition of Star Wars by Disney and its upcoming films with many of the original cast members signing on to play their iconic roles again. Since the narrative logistics of telling a sequel to the original film trilogy while keeping the canonicity of the much-celebrated Expanded Universe of various other media would be impossible, Disney announced that the imprint of Star Wars Legends will keep the Expanded Universe novels in print as an alternative narrative to the one to be told in the new films and their accompanying media. This development illustrates the economic implications of PWT as commercial endeavors worth billions utilize the concepts of PWT to supplant their former multimedia narratives with a new one without destroying any true canonicity. As corporate interests take charge, PWT becomes a nice tool for manipulating official narratives in order to keep every fan’s favorite stories sanctioned as “true” within the fictional realms. Additionally, fan interaction will be examined in this chapter by looking at how Rowling’s Harry Potter series has become one of the premier landscapes upon which fans have endeavored to continue the narratives of their favorite characters via the means of fan fiction.