The relationship of oppositional gender consciousness to narrative is the particular focus of this chapter’s attention to “gendered worlds” in postwar utopian and speculative writing. Tracing the resistance to the “defeating circularity” of gender binarism since the 1950s, this chapter surveys authors’ (re)figurations of sex and gender, as well as race, from the sex/gender fluidity in Ursula K. LeGuin and Samuel Delany, to the queer kinships of contemporary queer and Afrofuturist writers. The chapter considers a cluster of feminist dystopian novels modeled after Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale; forgetting Atwood’s narratological escape hatch in the “Historical Notes,” these novels are unable to imagine past the violent motive of binaristic gender ideology. Novels by Louise Erdrich and Lidia Yuknavich succeed in breaking that mold, offering queer futures that reimagine reproductive futurism in a new utopian register. The chapter concludes with the queer futures of brilliant African-American writers, including Rivers Solomon and Nnedi Okorafor.

In 1936, the first Surrealist Exhibition of Objects was held at the Charles Ratton Gallery in Paris, displaying the most diverse array of material objects in the history of surrealist exhibitions to date. André Breton elaborates on this aspect of the exhibition in his enigmatic “Crisis of the Object” which was written as a text to accompany the exhibition catalog. While it has been widely read as an interpretation for a scientific reckoning of surrealism, this chapter shows that “Crisis of the Object” was rather a reflection on Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse” and his materialist conception of poetry published fifty years before. A reconsideration of Breton’s theory of objects through the recent lens of new materialism offers insight into how the surrealist engagement with things in the 1930s was – and still is – revolutionary in that it sought to propose an antianthropocentric poetics of the world.

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is concerned with the experience of understanding that takes place in living language. Living language is a matter of conversation and dialogue. Conversation and dialogue always take place in a living language within the historical context of a tradition. Gadamer’s hermeneutics challenges philosophy’s usual focus on the logic of statements. This is a profoundly Socratic-Platonic idea. The world is presented in language as a communicative event which is dialogical. The dialectic of the word in hermeneutics has a speculative structure.

This introduction outlines the aims of Virtual Play to propose an alternative mode of literary engagement to existing forms of historicist, aesthetic, and ideological criticism, especially those which have fallen under the label of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. It defines the book’s use of the terms ‘play’ and ‘virtual’, especially in relation to recent theoretical and philosophical work around these topics, establishes the stakes of a new, more vicarious criticism, and justifies why the novel form in the mid-nineteenth century is an especially productive intersection for this practice. It explains the structure of the book, and provides an outline of the argument within each chapter.

This conclusion places the arguments of Virtual Play within the larger context of virtual and fictional experiences in our culture, and reiterates the stakes of a more participatory, more vicarious criticism for understanding why imaginative literature continues to matter today. It gives a brief account of the ‘patch notes’ to the popular video game The Sims 4, and suggests how the imaginative structure of digital simulations meaningfully parallels the pleasures of novel fiction we have been documenting. Finally, it acknowledges potential problems with and proposes a future direction for this research, pointing to the role that vicarious reading has to play both in raising and answering questions about simulated violence and intimacy.

This chapter reconsiders what liveness means in a musical culture saturated with digital technologies. Where once live performance was understood in simple opposition to recordings, the proliferation of electronic audio technologies throughout the second half of the twentieth century and their deployment in myriad performance settings has made the categorical separation of recording from performance impossible. Digital technologies have become even further intertwined with the creation of performative meaning than their analogue predecessors. After explaining the development of the liveness concept, the author emphasises the increasing variability of its configuration in the digital age, drawing on discourses around virtuality, posthuman subjectivity and intermediality. The chapter concludes with case studies in musical activity in Second Life and in the microtiming-based compositions of Richard Beaudoin, emphasising the extent to which liveness has become for some artists an actual element of aesthetic interrogation, rather than just a way of categorising a musical experience.

Music plays a significant role in both the establishment of and immersion in virtual worlds. This chapter theorises various forms of musical virtual reality, arguing that the virtual worlds of music challenge existing understandings of virtual reality and immersion. Analysing recording technology, mobile music, video games and the phenomenology of listening, the chapter argues that musical virtual reality can be theorised as an omnipresent, perpetually moving and embodied circulation of musical energy. Musical virtual reality invites a ‘drastic’ musicology that engages with the immediate, immersive and affectively powerful aspects of the listening event.