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The Cognitive Theory of Character Reception: an Updated Proposal

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The Cognitive Theory of Character Reception: an Updated Proposal 117 RALF SCHNEIDER , Bielefeld The Cognitive Theory of Character Reception: An Updated Proposal I. Introduction: Character Reception and Two Paradigms of Cognitive Literary Studies Character is arguably the one single element of prose narrative that matters most to most readers most of the time, and the same can be said for the readers and spectators of drama and film. Although character has never been at the forefront of scholarly interest in literature, the study of character has never really run out of steam either, and some recent activities in literary scholarship and film studies testify to the central- ity of character. Research on character is scattered widely across diverse areas of inquiry, including semiotics, stylistics, media studies, psychology and philosophy, to name only the major fields. 1 One way of approaching characters is to analyse the effects they have on readers. 2 A seminal paper by Richard J. Gerrig and David W. Allbritton (1990) that looked at character from the point of view of cognitive psy- chology left no doubt that empirical studies in the cognitive sciences as well as theo- retical concepts and models of cognition are capable of feeding into a reader-oriented cognitive theory of character, emphasizing the dynamic processes that occur in the reader's mind when understanding characters in fictional worlds. Taking my cue from Gerrig and Allbritton, I proposed a cognitive theory of the dynamics of character reception over a decade ago. 3 My approach emerged from an appreciation of questions raised by the Constance School of reception theory, particularly in the work of Wolfgang Iser (1974; 1978). This appreciation was accompanied, however, by some misgivings about the psychology in which Iser's assumptions about potential reading effects were grounded. Ultimately, the phenomenological tool kit offered only blunt instruments for the dissection of the actual processes in the mind of the readers (such as the filling of 'gaps' or the 'identification' with characters), and the core concept of the 'implied reader' more often than not turned 1 As an example of the continued interest of literary scholars in character, see the work of Uri Margolin (1983; 1990; 2003); cf. also Grabes (1978; 2004; 2008) and a special issue of Style on character in 1990 (see Knapp 1990). For recent treatments, see Vermeule (2010), the contributions from various disciplines in Eder, Jannidis and Schneider (2010) and the extensive bibliography on characters in fic- tional worlds in that volume (pp. 571-596); see Leschke and Heidbrink (2010) for another volume that in- cludes multidisciplinary media studies of character. Jens Eder (2008) has produced the most comprehen- sive investigation of character in film; cf. also the concise summary of that approach in Eder (2010). 2 Herbert Grabes was among the first German scholars of English Literature to inquire into the processes of character reception in an important article on 'how sentences turn into persons' (see Grabes 1978 and for an English version: Grabes 2004). 3 I first formulated the theory in my PhD thesis (Schneider 2000) and then made an attempt at condens- ing the central tenets into an article (Schneider 2001). At the 2006 MLA convention in Philadelphia, I was given the chance to present the approach in a panel on "Cognitive Approaches to Character," or- ganised by David Herman; in 2008 I had the chance to discuss it with Jonathan Culpeper at a confer- ence held at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University; Culpeper had been working on a strikingly comparable theory of characterisation in drama (Culpeper 2001; 2002) – with- out either of us being aware of the other's model. Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 24.2 (September 2013): 117-134. Anglistik, Jahrgang 24 (2013), Ausgabe 2 © 2013 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 118 RALF SCHNEIDER , Bielefeld out to be a container into which the theorist could pour all introspective 'evidence.' I also felt that structuralist categories of character taxonomy (such as flat vs. round or static vs. dynamic characters) tended to disregard the fact that readers will continually process information from the very first sentences they read onwards, update their mental representations of the text, and revise or reject expectations. An approach was called for that takes cognizance of the dynamics of the reception process. My expectation was that the cognitive sciences, including cognitive-psychological research on text processing, social cognition and emotion, would yield more satisfactory and more differentiated answers than either phenomenological psychology or structuralist theory had ever been in a position to do. Although it has been admitted that "many nuances of literary appreciation are beyond the scope of extant cognitive science theories" (Gerrig and Egidi 2003, 34), and although the relationship between narratology and the cognitive sciences is far from unproblematic (Ryan 2010), cognitive science has still provided highly differentiated descriptions of the complex processes of text understanding. In my take on character reception, I aimed at integrating the findings on discourse processing available at the time, some insights from social cognition and from cognitive theories of emotional response to fiction. At the root of this approach lies the reader's construction of a mental model in the process of understanding character. It follows the conviction that there are qualitatively different Winter Journals types of mental models that readers construct of characters, depending on a number of textual and reader-related factors. Using the categorizations proposed by Alan Richardson (2004) in his helpful field map of studies in literature and cognition, my contribution is perhaps best classified as belonging to the realm of "Cognitive Esthetics of Reception." The central tenets of my theory appear not to have been outdated, falsified or even for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution disturbed by more recent advances in the cognitive sciences: Rather, other approaches in reader-oriented cognitive literary studies have continued to work on the basis of the sources I used, too, 4 and the discipline that calls itself Cognitive Poetics has gained considerable ground since the beginning of the millennium. 5 However, some elements of my theory have been criticised, and I will refer to the criticismPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) below, being grateful to all commentators. 6 What is more, some more recent contributions by cognitivists in general and cognitive linguists and narratologists in particular may broaden the scope of my approach and lead to shifts in emphasis. 7 And, of course, no individual theoretical 4 The work of David S. Miall is perhaps the best example of theoretical and empirical studies in that field; see Miall (2006) for a survey of his most important findings and theorizing; cf. Miall (2007; 2011) for his continuing interest in the area of readers' emotions. See Emmott and Sanford (2012) for a very recent contribution to the cognitive investigation of text-reader interaction in narrative comprehension. 5 For Cognitive Poetics, see Stockwell (2002) and Gavins and Steen (2003). 6 Herbert Grabes takes me to task for not having mentioned his work because "it would have made things that were being presented as new not so new after all" (2008, 126). I would like to state that in my book-length study I did refer to his 1978 article (see Schneider 2000, 30); I did not in my 2001 ar- ticle, however, because that was directed at an Anglo-American audience. Grabes also takes issue with my neglect of the question why readers should take literary characters to be such life-like illusions (2008, 127f.); in view of the space I devote to frames of social cognition and emotional involvement in my thesis, I do not understand that point of criticism. What is more, to state as Grabes does that characters "do not appear as constructions to readers" (2008, 127) means to disregard the effect that characters may have as aesthetic artefacts; apart from my brief comments on aesthetic emotions (Schneider 2000, 127- 132) see approaches, e.g. by Phelan (1989) or Eder (2008; 2010), in which the very 'constructedness' of the characters is regarded to be among the factors that influence recipients' reactions to character. 7 Michael Burke (2011) has proposed an account of the literary reading process that also builds on the Anglistik, Jahrgang 24 (2013), Ausgabe 2 © 2013 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) THE COGNITIVE THEORY OF CHARACTER RECEPTION : AN UPDATED PROPOSAL 119 proposal will ever tackle all issues involved in a phenomenon so that my model had its blind spots like every other model. I appreciate the opportunity provided by this volume to present my approach afresh, to react to criticism and to update it. The focus of the approach continues to be on readers' potential operations of information processing in character reception. Other approaches, however, including 'Conceptual Blending Theory,' 'Cognitive Narratology' (two more of Richardson's categories) as well 'Theory of Mind' may also be related to a reader-oriented cognitive view of character, as I will demonstrate below. 8 To view the reception of 'people' in literature from the vantage point of the cogni- tive sciences means to acknowledge that "characters arise as a result of a complex interaction between the incoming textual information on the one hand and the con- texts of our heads on the other," as Culpeper (2001, 251) puts it in a formula encapsu- lating the interactionist basis of all current text-understanding research. Most scholars choosing this approach will also share Culpeper's conviction that the theory needs to integrate these two sources of character construction, the external and the internal, if it is to account for the range of potential effects that the beings inhabiting fictional worlds may have on readers or audiences.
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