What is it about?
Can stones feel attracted to each other? Are trees gendered? Was Medusa in the Greek myth a real person? These are some of the questions that were explored in so-called paradoxographical texts in the ancient Greek world. The questions could range from medicine and science to myth and erotic tales, offering solutions to problems or pragmatic explanations of strange phenomena. In this article I analyse a selection of such ancient paradoxographical stories from the perspective of cognitive narratology, trying to show their relevance as carriers of storyworlds that can be used in various genres that tell love stories.
Featured Image
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Even the smallest fragment of a story most often contains a storyworld: an imaginary that triggers the reader to engage and create their own vision of the setting and its characters. Such worlds travel beyond genres, across periods and cultures, so that storyworlds from distant times or places may seem strangely familiar to someone who has never experienced them before. The power of discourse to construct realities is simply immense; to understand that is to understand the world.
Perspectives
Even though this article treats material that is largely unknown to a wider audience, I think that readers will recognize the storyworld it describes: one in which love is a little boy with wings, carrying a torch that sets hearts on fire, making our limbs feel weak. Such imagery still marks the way in which we think and feel about desire. Storyworlds are simply fundamental not only for the understanding of literature, but also for the understanding of ourselves and the world in which we live.
Ingela Nilsson
Uppsala Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: To Render Unbelievable Tales Believable: The Storyworlds of Paradoxography, October 2024, Brill,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004707351_005.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
