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An impossible world is presented by a discourse which shows why a story is impossible. An impossible possible world does not merely mention something inconceivable. It builds up the very conditions of its own inconceivability. Both Penrose's figure and Robbe-Grillet's novel are materially possible qua visual or verbal texts, but they seem to refer to something that cannot be. |
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There is a difference between visual and verbal impossible possible worlds, due to different strategies in the cooperative appeal implemented by the Linear Text Manifestation. A visual illusion is a short-term process, since visual signs are spatially displayed all togetherwhile with verbal language the temporal (or spatial) linearity of the signifiers makes the recognition of inconsistency more difficult. Being immediately perceived as a whole, Penrose's figure encourages an immediate, more analytical scanning, so that its inconsistency can be suddenly detected. On the contrary, in a verbal text, the linear and temporally ordered (step by step) scanning makes more difficult a global analysis of the whole textthat requires an interplay of long-and short-term memory. Thus in verbal texts the representation of impossible possible worlds can be taken superficially as conceivable for pages and pages before the contradiction they display is realized. To render more and more puzzling such a feeling of imbalance, these texts can use several syntactic strategies. |
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As an example of long-term illusion (and of the linguistic strategy |
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