The Fictional Arts – An Inter–Art Journey from Theatre Theory to the Arts

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the analysis of fictional worlds in various realms of the arts, including: theatre, opera, figurative ballet, mime, audio drama, figurative drawing/painting, figurative sculpture, the strip cartoon, animation, puppet theatre, still photography, the photo-novel, 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 these mediums. In contrast, The Fictional Arts explores their common grounds. The 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. The book analyzes numerous fictional worlds in all these arts, especially in theatre and cinema. The Fictional Arts presupposes that principles underlying the generation of descriptions of fictional worlds by the theatre medium, as proposed in two earlier books by author Eli Rozik, also apply to all the iconic/fictional arts. The textbook format has been purposefully designed to address the needs of undergraduate and postgraduate students, suiting the structure of university courses and providing all necessary reference information to access the images/artistic works discussed, 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.