Thirteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Writing Studies and Narrative Studies are both emerging as conceptual antidotes to a literary criticism model of creative writing, particularly fiction, whether short narrative forms, novellas and novels, or screenplays. Literary Theory, particularly Literary Criticism, was developed as a systematic tool to analyze writing and is also often employed when discussing cinematic stories. However, Literary Theory does not adequately address the narrative underpinnings involved in generating creative writing. Narrative Studies and Writing Studies both fill in the gap between generation of creative work and the publication of that work. In the emerging world of the metaverse as a fictional setting, the Literary Theory model is particularly insufficient as a framework for discussing how this particular kind of location can be handled at a generative stage of the writing process. Using the framework of Narrative Studies, particularly locational Points of Telling, this digital poster presentation addresses ways in which fictional setting has been handled by creative writers by providing a digital survey of these environments and asking, how can writing about the Metaverse and other Mixed Reality environments be taught, especially when Literary and Cinematic Analyses of these environments are just now occurring, leading to a dearth of available research on the subject. I provide a digital survey of some of these environments in film and fiction and apply to them the lenses of Narrative Studies and Writing Studies in order to examine possible strategies for teaching fictional settings as a part of a generative approach to writing.

Presenters

Christa Fraser
Lecturer, Merritt Writing Program, School of Social, Sciences, Humanities, and Arts, University of California, Merced, California, United States