EITHER/ OR, AND BEYOND
EITHER/ OR, AND BEYOND

Summary/Abstract: Reality and fiction build a binary which shared the fate of dualist thinking in general in the postmodernist age, dominated by deconstruction. The climactic point was probably reached by the fabrication of lens which magnify reality. The fabrication of virtual reality lens was meant to augment reality, virtual reality meaning less or a deformed reality show. Science and technology have thus reified the philosophical battle over positivist taxonomies and classifications that first came under the philosophical onslaught of Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. The “either/ or” dichotomy of the former ended up in the latter’s “beyond”, which, in quantum language, is a superposition of opposite states. Although the bulk of fantasy and science-fiction still capitalizes on the distinct ontologies of reality and fiction, the literature of late modernity (modernism and postmodernism) speculated on an ontological hybrid bridging the ontological gap between the two of them. Such are the modernist novel, “Isabel and the Devil’s Waters” by Mircea Eliade, and the postmodernist story, “Schrödinger’s Cat,” by Ursula K. Le Guin read in the key of an ontological poetics in the present paper.

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