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Thanks, Bharath--that was a very helpful gloss on Elgin's talk (now I wish you'd been to Kauffman's, and could walk me through that one also!). Especially striking to me is your notion of characters or plots LEAPING OUT of their fictional contexts to supply categories that we can use in making sense of what occurs around us, to provide structures for organizing our experiences. This provides such a dynamic sense of the relationship between literary "thought experiments" and the world in which we move, as a bi-directional activity in which stories both arise from and affect our experiences in an on-going "loop."

We've been looking @ this dynamic (though I didn't yet have your words for it) in my genre class this week, where we have been studying the emerging genre of blogging, and thinking about the degree to which writing one's life in public may actually pre-figure and shape one's experiences. One recent visitor, who had written a travel blog while living in Chile, reported that she climbed a volcano because she didn't want to blog afterwards that she'd failed to. Another study we read about The Diary on the Internet reports on Steve Schalchlin's experience in writing one of the earliest Web diaries, Living in the Bonus Round, about his experience of (not) dying of AIDS: "Many of his readers began to think of Schalchlin as a literary character, the protagonist of ...  'a LIVING NOVEL' .... the textual has come to shape the lived life .... Schalchlin is now both producer and product of his autobiographical narrative." There's something very interesting going on here, as bloggers use this new form to stabilize a sense of themselves, in a time and space of change and fragmentation...