The Fictional Arts

Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive introduction to the analysis of fictional worlds in a set of fifteen arts, including theatre, opera, figurative ballet, mime, audio drama, figurative drawing/painting, figurative sculpture, strip cartoon, animation, puppet theatre, still photography, photo-novel, silent movie, cinema and TV drama. Due to their extreme differences, the combination of different arts in the description of a single fictional world, and the translation from one medium to another, are considered problematic. While such differences do not concern fictional creativity, which applies the same poetic and rhetoric rules whatever the medium, it is widely accepted that the problem lies in the extreme differences between the mediums of description. In contrast, this study explores their common grounds. These arts are iconic in nature, and if 'iconicity' is re-defined in terms of imprinting images on matter and mediation of language, and as reflecting the common roots of these mediums in a preverbal mode of imagistic thinking, therein is an explanation of their possible combination and translation from one medium to another without impairing the receivers' reading, interpreting and experiencing capacities. Eli Rozik analyses numerous fictional worlds in all these arts, produced during the last 2,500 years of artistic creativity, especially in theatre, art and cinema. This book presupposes that principles underlying the generation of descriptions of fictional worlds by the theatre medium, as proposed in two earlier works (Generating Theatre Meaning and Fictional Thinking), also apply to all the iconic/fictional arts. The text-book format of the volume has been purposefully designed to address the needs of undergraduate and postgraduate students, suiting the structure of university courses and providing all necessary information to access the images/artistic works discussed in the volume via the web and Google. This inter-art journey from theatre theory to the arts is compelling reading for all those involved and engaged in artistic creativity.