The Fictional Arts

Looking across the range of iconic media (literature, theater, opera, figurative ballet, mime, audio drama, figurative drawing/painting, figurative sculpture, strip cartoon, animation, puppet theater, still photography, photo-novel, silent movie, cinema, and TV drama), Rozik (emeritus, theater studies, Tel Aviv U., Israel) argues that all are capable of describing fictional worlds, that they share and reflect the same iconic principles of generating meaning, and that all fictional worlds share and reflect the same poetic and rhetoric principles of fictional thinking. These principles hold that the structure of fictional interactions embody the receivers' archetypal expectations which reflect biological and culturally-conditioned wishful and/or fearful thinking, fictional worlds personify authors' and receivers' psychical state of affairs, fictional worlds are potential metaphoric descriptions of receivers' psychical sate of affairs, and fictional worlds are embodiments of the authors' and receivers' fictional thoughts. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation 穢2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)