No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
This chapter examines the narratological concept of metalepsis in relation to metaphysical texts, investigating how competing metaphysical assumptions affect the ways in which metalepsis is thought to operate in relation to empirical experience. It takes as a major point of reference Christopher Nolan’s 2010 movie Inception, in which three distinct narrative levels are troped as dreams within dreams. The film’s closing scene raises and leaves unanswered the question whether the level inhabited at that point by the central character is his ‘reality’ (as he believes) or whether he is still within a dream. For many people who inhabit the world of empirical experience, that world is not ultimate ‘reality’, which lies at one level removed. As examples of this attitude in texts concerned with metaphysics, the chapter explores Fate in Virgil’s Aeneid and the apostrophized God in Augustine’s Confessions before focusing on the Platonic appeal to the world of the Forms. In the emergence of a ‘classical’ metaphysics of an ultimate reality lying beyond time, change, and narrative, however, the key ancient figure is Parmenides; but ancient texts that embrace those very features, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, already point to the ‘counter-classical’ metaphysics which has come to the fore in the wake of Heidegger’s Being and Time and has recently achieved remarkable prominence. The conclusion of the chapter explores how, within such a ‘counter-classical’ metaphysics, the narrative frames by which we order and project our empirical experience break in on each other as they establish what we accept as our ‘reality’.
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.