2016—Lubomir Dolezel
Born in 1922, Lubomír Doležel, is one of the most distinguished literary theorists of the 20th and 21st centuries. During his career he published seven influential monographs (four in English, three in Czech) and at least ninety articles, edited or co-edited three collections, and is the subject of four Festschrifts. One of the founders of possible worlds theory, he was the first (in an article in Poetics Today in 1980) to apply J. L. Austin’s concept of performative language to fiction. Like the “I do” of the marriage ceremony, which, when spoken in the appropriate circumstances, gets people married, the statements of an unidentified narrator, Doležel perceived, bring the fictional world into being. This origin explains why a fictional world is knowable in a way that our world is not: whatever the unidentified narrator says is, is (unless contradicted within the text), and is not subject to evidence from outside the text. Doležel develops the epistemological effects of this theory for fiction in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (1998), his best-known book. His earlier Occidental Poetics (1990) selects and describes milestones in the development of a poetics over two millennia. Because Doležel’s grasp of literary studies is so thorough that he can discern the elements of each theory that influence subsequent theories, his study offers fresh insight into aspects of earlier theorists’ work that have proven most valuable. In his latest book in English, Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage (2010), he returns to possible worlds theory to argue that the possible worlds of fiction and the possible worlds of history differ—in their origins and also in their cultural functions and semantic features. Still active and full of innovative ideas, he has yet another monograph, this one in Czech, forthcoming this year. ISSN is happy and proud to grant Lubomír Doležel the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award.