Dolezel, 1995. “Fictional Worlds: Density, Gaps, and Inference.

” Style 29
(2): 201–14.

Finite texts, the only texts that humans are capable of producing, necessarily
create incomplete worlds.

Thomas G. Pavel has observed that "authors and cultures have the choice to
minimize or maximize" the "unavoidable incompleteness" of fictional
worlds; he has suggested that cultures and periods of a "stable world view"
tend to minimize incompleteness whereas periods of "transition and conflict"
tend to maximize it (108-09).

Iser: "The process of assembling the meaning of the text is not a private one,
for although it does mobilize the subjective disposition of the reader, it does
not lead to day-dreaming but to the fulfillment of conditions that have
already been structured in the text" (Act 49-50).

- "Without the elements of indeterminacy, the gaps in the text, we should not
be able to use our imagination" (Implied 283; see also Act 194). And so in
recreating the world, the reader's imagination "fills in the gaps left by the
text itself." Moreover, "each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own
way ...; as he reads, he will make his own decision as to how the gap is to be
filled" (Iser, Implied 280; see also Iser, "Indeterminacy").