Fantasy Multiverse World-Building: Affect and Affinity in Diana Wynne Jones

Abstract

This thesis employs a cognitive stylistics approach to study the reader’s orientational experience in fantasy multiverse storyworlds and its potential to disrupt cognitive processes of Otherization. Building from the premises of Deictic Shift Theory, which explain how storyworld engagement involves orientating oneself to the spaces in which the story takes place, I incorporate ideas from affect theories to propose a set of tools that investigate the emotional entanglements of orientating in fantasy multiverses. I argue that storyworld orientation calls upon the reader’s embodied, personal senses of proprioception and relational feelings, and can therefore be deeply impactful to the reader outside the story. Specifically, I propose that storyworld orientation is doubly deictic, with one index in the storyworld and the other anchored in the actual world. I demonstrate how fantasy multiverses foreground this doubly deictic experience by cuing the reader into operationalizing the idea of the actual world to understand its multiple-world divisions. Relatedly, the division of space into different worlds emphasizes the boundary between “here” and “there” and its associated distinctions between “me” and “not-me,” which encourages categorization for meaning. The reader’s orientational selfness is pulled by various loyalties related to these indexes and categories, thereby complicating the idea of the “other” and its associated feelings and meanings. My corpus includes six Diana Wynne Jones novels marketed to young adult and middle grade readers, set in five distinct fantasy multiverses. This thesis considers storyworlds through the narrative medium and therefore sections the inspections according to narrative’s qualities of sequence and coherency. Chapters one through three consider the implications of fantasy multiverse orientation at the sequential narrative points of beginning, middle, and end, respectively. Chapter four considers fantasy multiverse orientation using multiple texts. All chapters explore how orientating in fantasy multiverses can engage the reader’s categorical feelings that impact their affective understandings of the characters and the story. Depending on where in the narrative orientation occurs, its associated process could reframe or change the reader’s affective stance toward the same characters, impacting story experience and meaning. The chapters also consider how the orientational processes prompted by the various corpus texts might affect the reader’s cognitions regarding alienation, including finding reflection of their own experiences of being alienated, becoming more exposed to others’ alienated realities, raising awareness of the subjective nature of their understandings of others, and exercising a cognitive path that separates the identification of someone as “not-me” from fixed meanings, feelings, or values, dissuading Otherization. I argue that these embodied processes have the potential to alter the reader’s affective horizons and cognitive habits, such as increase their sense of agency, raise self-awareness, and impel change.