From Two-Worldliness to Allotopia: Towards Philosophico-Literary Approach to World-Building Narratives

In this chapter, inspired by Bernhard Waldenfels’ phenomenology of the Other and its ‘xenotopographic’ interpretation, it is examined whether a typical – for fantasy and SF genres – two-world or ‘portal-quest’ model (empirical world → symbolical gate → counterempirical world) is not nowadays replaced with the pre-established, immersive, and purely imaginative storyworld (purum figmentum). Consequently, it is stated that philosophical premises of such world-building and a representative for it genre of allotopia are altogether contributing to a significant shift between 20th and 21st century fiction that manifests in the tendency to create the storyworld prior to the storyline – as a ‘matrix for possible narratives’. Finally, it is claimed that this type of prose particularly invites modelling heterotopian frontiers within the allotopian storyworld – but no more entangles itself in the paradigm of ‘realist imperialism’ by supporting easy, though gravely colonial, juxtapositions of empirical, real, factual and counterempirical, unreal, or counterfactual worlds.

Krzysztof M. Maj