Literature, American

Using Marie-Laure Ryan's definition of the law of minimal departure, I propose an important addendum, the clause of congruency. It is necessary to delve deeper into the connection a reader makes with a textual possible world and its relation to the actual world. The textual world, with all its various rules and mores, becomes just as accessible to the reader as the world he currently resides in, so long as it flows along in a logical manner. It is only when something appears that is incongruent with the reader's understanding of the textual world, the reader is forced to dissemble his current textual world and build a new one. Ray Bradbury utilizes the clause of congruence to reveal meaning in three of his novels.

In The Republic, Plato constructs the ideal city-state built on the principle of justice. Plato establishes an urban utopia with a set of morals through which the citizen helps the state and the state helps the citizen. Centuries after Plato's Republic, Neal Stephenson presents in Snow Crash, a cyberpunk adventure, a virtual city known as the Metaverse. Hiro Protagonist, as his name implies, defends his virtual city from a threatening virus in the same way that a citizen in Plato's Republic would protect the city-state. An analysis of Snow Crash using ideas from The Republic reveals the "hacker" to be a socially minded individual who preserves order in the cybernetic utopia that is the Metaverse. This analysis demonstrates that justice must be sought in every era, and that heroes unique to their milieu pursuit justice.

In "Smoke Ghost" (1941), Fritz Leiber created the contemporary paradigm for the "urban horror story" that has been so successfully exploited by Stephen King, Richard Matheson, Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell and many others. At the heart of Leiber's ghost stories, however, rest a firm "tradition" of supernatural fiction, stemming from primitive religion, on the one hand, and literary example on the other. While his urban settings (Chicago, San Francisco) may be seen as contemporary reinterpretations of Horace Walpole's Gothic castle, his specters are the lineal descendants of Shakespeare's, LeFanu's, and Henry James's. Leiber's later use of Jungian archetypes (Shadow and Anima) is superimposed on the traditional ghostly archetype. An analysis of his novel-length ghost story, Our Lady of Darkness , reveals the lurking malevolence of a LeFanu specter, while the ghosts of Shakespeare hover in the wings of stories in which he explores themes of sex, guilt, and death. In each of Leiber's ghost stories, the elements of the tradition combine with "haunts" from the author's personal psychic history to produce a powerful fantasy experience that persists despite threats to the genre by "science, common sense, and psychiatry."