摘要
We will discuss here the tension between the reality of new media and narratological theory, and the case in point will be cinema. Our thesis is that new media have to do with illusion, basically with illusion, and only derivatively with imagination; on the contrary, the field of literature has to do with imagination, strictly with imagination, not with illusion at all. If it is so, something must be wrong with the pretence of narratology, which has literature as its basic referent, to be the adequate theoretical frame in order to understand every cultural phenomenon, especially in the case of new media. We have to insist on the distinction between illusion and imagination. In fact, most literary theorists do not bear in mind such distinction; it tends to completely disappear under the general title ＂fiction.＂ To be sure, it is usually said of cinema that it is fiction, like literature, but cinema is much more than fiction, it is illusion, even if it is the illusion of a story.
