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Cognitive Linguistics and New Testament Narrative: Investigating Methodology through Characterization (Special Issue), Biblical Interpretation 29.4–5 (2021).
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The rise of performance criticism prompts questions about its relationship to other disciplines, most notably narrative criticism. While narrative critics traditionally focus solely on the textual elements within their cultural context, performance critics adopt a broader understanding of the term “text”, encompassing not only the cultural context but also performative aspects, such as the setting for public reading, the involvement of a skilled performer, and dynamics introduced by a diverse performance audience. This article demonstrates the distinctiveness of a performance-critical approach through a reappraisal of Mark 11:27–33, showing how such an approach yields different interpretive results when compared to traditional narrative criticism. More specifically, whereas traditional narrative readings generally conclude that Jesus is merely evading his interlocutors, I argue that a performance-critical approach suggests that many ancient listeners would have concluded that the lector-as-Jesus was insinuating, for those with ears to hear, that Jesus’s authority derives from God and was granted at his baptism.
This article contributes new insights into the interplay between textual and reader factors in experiences of narrative empathy, or empathy with characters in narrative. It adds to the rather scarce empirical evidence on the relationships between textual devices and readers’ (non-)empathetic responses to characters. This empirical study involved stylistic-narratological analysis of short stories by Eduardo Galeano and thematic analysis of focus group discussions. The study considers empathy in relation to victims and perpetrators in narratives of persecution and torture. Methodologically, the article emphasises the value of a qualitative approach to collecting and analysing readers’ responses that is half way between naturalistic and experimental orientations. The main findings, which revolve around the interaction between certain narrative techniques and readers’ moral evaluation of characters, challenge some theoretical claims from the scholarly literature about textual effects on readers’ empathy. In so doing, the article considers empathy as a highly flexible and context-dependent phenomenon, and suggests the need for a nuanced approach that accommodates the complex interaction between textual and reader factors in the reading context. The discussion spells out the broader implications of the study for stylistic research on the role of language in bringing about effects in readers and also for narrative empathy research. These implications will be of interest to scholars conducting reception studies or reader response research in the neighbouring fields of empirical stylistics, empirical narratology, and empirical literary studies.
This article examines recent theories of fictional characters, and raises the issue of how far characters can be understood with reference to human intersubjectivity. On the one hand, empirical research based on theories of rhetorical narrative ethics shows that phenomena such as sympathy and empathy are very relevant for the ways readers describe their imaginative connection with fictional characters. On the other hand, traditional narratology emphasizes that readers also engage with fiction as an artefact. This article focuses on the similarities and differences in these two conceptions of what engagement with fictional characters is, and asks how much of what readers get out of fiction depends on what is portrayed, and how much is the product of their enactment of form. Building on some yet unpublished results of an empirical testing conducted earlier by Sklar, as well as narratological and cognitive analyses of the concept of character, we examine our respective theoretical intuitions and set out a cognitive-rhetorical position that we both share. In that process we also clarify the ways in which cognitive literary studies can speak to the larger purpose of reading.
This book represents the state of the art in cognitive stylistics a rapidly expanding field at the interface between linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science. The twelve chapters combine linguistic analysis with insights from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics in order to arrive at innovative accounts of a range of literary and textual phenomena. The chapters cover a variety of literary texts, periods, and genres, including poetry, fictional and non-fictional narratives, and plays. Some of the chapters provide new approaches to phenomena that have a long tradition in literary and linguistic studies (such as humour, characterisation, figurative language, and metre), others focus on phenomena that have not yet received adequate attention (such as split-selves phenomena, mind style, and spatial language). This book is relevant to students and scholars in a wide range of areas within linguistics, literary studies and cognitive science.
Understanding literary character is a dynamic process in which the reader's knowledge structures and cognitive and emotional strategies continually interact with textual information. Dynamic effects of reading, such as inferencing or the formation and rejection of hypotheses, can only be described adequately if this interplay between top-down and bottom-up processing of information is examined. From these two sources of information, readers construct mental models not only of fictional situations, time, and space, but also of characters. Throughout the reading process, readers elaborate, modify, or revise character models to incorporate incoming information. A cognitive theory of literary character not only provides a systematic account of the constituent elements of character-reception from both text-related and reader-related sources, but it also proposes a process model that tries to capture the most important distinctive phases of mental-model construction in character-reception. The cognitive approach offers new categories for the analysis of literary character.
Blakey Vermeule wonders how readers become involved in the lives of fictional characters, people they know do not exist. Vermeule examines the ways in which readers' experiences of literature are affected by the emotional attachments they form to fictional characters and how those experiences then influence their social relationships in real life. She focuses on a range of topics, from intimate articulations of sexual desire, gender identity, ambition, and rivalry to larger issues brought on by rapid historical and economic change. Vermeule discusses the phenomenon of emotional attachment to literary characters primarily in terms of 18th-century British fiction but also considers the postmodern work of Thomas Mann, J. M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, and Chinua Achebe. From the perspective of cognitive science, Vermeule finds that caring about literary characters is not all that different from caring about other people, especially strangers. The tools used by literary authors to sharpen and focus reader interest tap into evolved neural mechanisms that trigger a caring response. This book contributes to the emerging field of evolutionary literary criticism. Vermeule draws upon recent research in cognitive science to understand the mental processes underlying human social interactions without sacrificing solid literary criticism. People interested in literary theory, in cognitive analyses of the arts, and in Darwinian approaches to human culture will find much to ponder in Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved.
Like most other literary-critical terms, "character," "figure" or "person" are polysemic and ambiguous. For the purpose of this essay, "character" or "person" in narrative will be understood as designating a human or human-like individual, existing in some possible world, and capable of fulfilling the argument position in the propositional form DO(X) - that is, a Narrative Agent (=NA), to whom inner states, mental properties (traits, features) or complexes of such properties (personality models) can be ascribed on the basis of textual data. This particular explication of the term has the advantage of capturing the reader's intuitive understanding of the term, while at the same time enabling a disciplined and explicit study of this phenomenon within narratology. The ascription of individual mental traits to an NA may be called "characterization," and the ascription of complexes of traits "character-building" or "portraiture." The two activities are logically and substantively different. The first is the primary one and is based on inference drawn from individual acts of the NA, details of his looks and setting, etc. (see below). Character-building, on the other hand, comes later and involves several additional operations. These include the accumulation of a number of traits from several successive acts of the NA, setting, or formal patterns; a generalization concerning their extent in terms of narrative time; the classification or categorization of these traits; their interrelation in terms of a network or hierarchy of traits; a confrontation of traits belonging to successive acts in order to infer second order traits such as "inconsistent"; and finally, an attempt to interrelate the traits or trait-clusters into a unified stable constellation (configuration, pattern, Gestalt, personality model) of some duration in terms of narrative time. Character-building consists of a succession of individual operations of characterization, together with second order activities of continual patterning and repatterning of the traits obtained in the first order operations, until a fairly coherent