One of the most interesting things about fictional nar ratives is that they do not only mimetically reproduce the world as we know it. Many narratives confront us with bizarre storyworlds which are governed by prin ciples that have very little to do with the real world around us. Even though many narrative texts teem with unnatural (i.e., physically or logically impossible) scenarios that take us to the limits of human cogni tion, narrative theory has not yet done justice to these cases of unnaturalness or the question of how readers can come to terms with them. In what follows, I define the term unnatural and outline a cognitive model that describes ways in which readers can make sense of unnatural scenarios. Second, I use these reading strategies to discuss examples of unnaturalness in postmodernist narratives.1 Arguing that ideas from cognitive narratology help illuminate

Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them

A theory of temporal passage is put forward which is "objective" in the sense that time flow characterizes the universe independently of the existence of conscious beings. The theory differs from Grunbaum's "mind-dependence" theory, and is designed to avoid Grunbaum's criticisms of an earlier theory of Reichenbach's. The representation of temporal becoming is accomplished by the introduction of indeterministic universe-models; each model representing the universe at a time. The models depict the past as a single four-dimensional manifold, and the future as a branched structure of such manifolds. Time flow is relativistic in that it manifests itself in a frame-dependent (but not observer-dependent) way. The indeterministic character of the universe-models is mirrored in a "temporal" theory of truth which rejects the principle of bivalence, and suitable semantics are provided for this theory. Finally, an account of physical law is given which defines it in terms of physical possibility, rather than vice versa.

Objective time flow

Focusing primarily on the actor – human or nonhuman, individual or group, conscious or unconscious – Actor-Network Theory (ANT) explores the interconnectedness of all things. ANT recognises that all objects and things exhibit consciousness, and through a consciousness, interact heterogeneously in space; the location of the interaction(s), where they are performed homogeneously, is the landscape. If, as ANT promotes, all objects and things exhibit consciousness, then the closer in space they are to one another, the more essential they are to each other. These notions have specific ties to the on-going critique in landscape studies of focusing on rural and local scales, and the continuing debate in human (and physical) geography regarding the necessity of scale itself. Using ANT as a framework, and punctuated with true-life anecdotes, this article wraps the landscape-created-by-nature and the landscape-created-by-human debates into a non-dialectic whole, demonstrating, perhaps provocatively and controversially, that any landscape should be distinctly anti-dialectic and removed from scalar constraints. While ANT remains an often-overlooked and misunderstood technique for studying the landscape, this article’s crux rests in nothing less than attempting to lay the groundwork for using ANT as a practical technique when studying any landscape in any location at any time (and in any related disciplinary field). If indeed, as argued in this paper and as ANT suggests, everything is networked, then scale, specifically when applied to any landscape, becomes irrelevant.

On Actor‐Network Theory and landscape

This article explores the observation that highly limiting, creative decisions of voluntary self-binding that radically prune the design solution space may in fact fuel and accelerate the process toward an innovative final design. To gain insight into this phenomenon, we propose the concept ‘decisive constraints’ based on a review of current, but dispersed, studies into creativity constraints. We build decisive constraints on two definitional conditions related to radical decision-making and creative turning points. To test our concept analytically and ensure its relevance to creative practice, we apply the two definitional conditions to three media facade installation projects in which our interaction design research lab has been involved. In accord with insights from these case analyses, we argue that decisive constraints may inform current research into design processes and act as a creative resource for practitioners, not only in interaction design but, we assume, also across related creative ...

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Decisive constraints as a creative resource in interaction design

This essay, is a presentation of a succession of brief, tentative, and often incongruous readings of the human geography of contemporary Los Angeles, an urban region of both telling uniqueness and ...

Taking Los Angeles Apart: Some Fragments of a Critical Human Geography

The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969

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The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969

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Impossible Storyworlds—and What to Do with Them

Objective time flow

On Actor‐Network Theory and landscape

Decisive constraints as a creative resource in interaction design

Taking Los Angeles Apart: Some Fragments of a Critical Human Geography