The COVID-19 pandemic has had serious implications on educational systems worldwide and, hence, online courses have been organized. It is expected that the use of online learning in higher education promote knowledge sharing among students and the sharing of knowledge result in the improvement of reflective thinking among them. As such, we examined the knowledge sharing behavior among the undergraduate students in online learning English literature courses, the student’ perceptions towards reflective thinking, the relationship between the students’ knowledge sharing and reflective thinking, and finally, we tested a structural model of factors affecting knowledge sharing components, knowledge sharing, and reflective thinking. The data were collected through two surveys of 104 Iranian English literature students. A Pearson’s correlation coefficient and path analysis were used to analyze the data and to generate a model. The results showed that the students’ online knowledge sharing behavior and their perceptions towards reflective thinking are at unacceptable levels. Furthermore, a significant relationship was found between factors affecting knowledge sharing with the students’ knowledge sharing behavior, and between knowledge sharing and reflective thinking. The results also confirmed the mediator role of knowledge sharing and supported the hypothesized model of the relationships among the variables. Pedagogical implications of the study are finally discussed.

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Possible worlds, governed by known or unknown cosmic rules, if ever they existed, do ontologically exist in the realm of the imaginary and relate to the human potential to imagine beyond what we recognize as reality. This cognitive potential, tinged with postmodernist narrative techniques, can create alternative histories through which to contemplate the possible scenarios of the potential reality that could have happened depending on whether certain events did or did not happen. As far as Auster’s Man in the Dark (2008) is concerned, imagining possible worlds has found an outlet not only through what could happen existentially, but also in terms of quantum physics. As one of Auster’s contributions to alternative fiction, Man in the Dark presents us with a portrait of the underlying currents of world affairs and how they are interrelated through the very basic rules of existential philosophy and astrophysics.

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