VR Webinar: Persistent Worlds and Fictional Continuity

Timothy Gao will present the 2nd installment of our new series, 'Seeing Double: Books, Narratives, and Virtual Realities', on 7 October 2020.

19th century painting

Date and time: Wednesday 7 October 2020, 1:00-2:00PM AEST

Registration: Closed

Abstract: This paper explores a literary history of ‘persistence’: the sense that a virtual world “continues to exist and develop internally even when there are no people interacting with it.” (Bartle 2003). The idea that digital spaces, objects, and persons have their own (however limited) lives to lead, even when we’re not logged in, is a key part of how virtual worlds impress us with their independent and consistent ‘reality’. This is an idea enabled by the availability of 24/7 online servers, but I argue that ‘persistence’ is not a digital technology. Rather, it is an imaginative technique with a history in literary fiction.

Focussing on the writings of and about the Victorian novelist William Thackeray, this paper will examine the nineteenth-century feeling that fictional characters continue on after the story ends – and the pain of letting them go when finishing the book. The powerful feeling of fiction’s ‘persistence’, especially of realist fiction and its highly detailed creations, caused artistic turmoil for Thackeray, who became accused of writing unnecessary sequels which continuously and redundantly referenced his old characters.

By thinking about how novels give readers access to their fictional worlds, I propose how they represent a pre-digital form of virtual technology; and in return, how virtual worlds today run as much on fictional form as on an operating system.

Timothy Gao

Speaker: Dr Timothy Gao is the author of Virtual Play and the Victorian Novel: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Fictional Experience, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He holds a doctorate in English Literature from the University of Oxford, and will be starting as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in late 2020. His work has been published in Sydney Studies in English, Victorian Network, and Victorian Literature and Culture.

More Information

ERCC

ER-CC@unimelb.edu.au

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