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RALF SCHNEIDER , Bielefeld

The Cognitive Theory of Reception: An Updated Proposal

I. Introduction: Character Reception and Two Paradigms of Cognitive Literary Studies Character is arguably the one single element of prose that matters most to most readers most of the time, and the same can be said for the readers and spectators of and . Although character has never been at the forefront of scholarly interest in , 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 , , 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 aware of the other's model.

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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 and the cognitive sciences is far from unproblematic (Ryan 2010), cognitive science has still provided highly differentiated 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 . 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 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 -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 . 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

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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 inhabiting fictional worlds may have on readers or . Yet how the interaction between textual information and readers' prior knowledge is conceived of and how it may be investi- gated will depend on the conceptual and methodological tool kit brought to the task by theorists and researchers. Simplifying Richardson's six subdivisions of the field of cognitive criticism, 9 it suffices for my present purposes to distinguish between two major directions of research and theorizing within the cognitive approach that charac- ter-reception theory can draw on: The two directions may be termed the 'information processing paradigm' and the 'mental dispositions paradigm' respectively, although the division between the two is, obviously, not a hard-and-fast one. 10 The first term covers all text-processing (or, more generally, discourse-processing) research investigating the mechanisms and operations of bottom-up and top-down information processing in the of reading. Contributions to that field tend to be located in empirical cognitive psychology or cognitive . They have yielded the most clearly specified conceptualizations of the activities of the mind in text

extant literature in cognitive psychology, supported by recent findings in neurobiology. Burke points out – and amends – some of the deficiencies of earlier approaches; in particular, he argues that text un- derstanding must be approached in a less mechanistic fashion than did early discourse processing studies, and that the role of emotions and their connection with memory in reading must be acknowledged. I fol- low Burke in these evaluations. Burke uses the fine of an "oceanic mind" to capture the "dy- namic, fluvial and fluctuating" qualities of the mind in reading (2011, 1). I realize that my original ap- proach may have been too mechanistic to do justice to that quality of cognitive-emotional involvement. 8 For a of cognitive narratology that also takes into account the relationship between that approach and cognitive reception theory, see Eder (2003). 9 Besides 'Cognitive Esthetics of Reception,' 'Cognitive Narratology' and 'Cognitive Rheto- ric/Conceptual Blending Theory,' Richardson (2004) lists 'Cognitive Poetics,' 'Evolutionary ' and 'Cognitive Materialism and Historicism.' 10 I am wary of using the term 'paradigm' – which has been used to excess for innovative approaches within fields of inquiry that would themselves not even achieve paradigm status in Kuhn's (1971) strict sense of the term. The more or less peaceful coexistence of the most diverse approaches in literary studies alone makes the talk of paradigm shifts sound preposterous; in a similar vein, any mention of 'turns' (linguistic, cultural, cognitive, or otherwise) had best be avoided, for that concept suggests that a scholarly community was following a single, consensual path and then engaged in a common change of direction – another notion that no two adherents of different schools within our field would sub- scribe to. If I speak of paradigms here, I do so in a much looser sense than conceptual rigour would re- quire. For a similar use of the term in relation to cognitive criticism, see Bizup and Kintgen (1993).

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understanding, and character theory may avail itself of their findings with considerable profit. While the virtue of the first paradigm lies in its ability to analyse the complexity of automatic processes by disentangling the individual steps, the second paradigm is one in which the role of more general mental operations, as well as the underlying dispositions of the mental apparatus in the construction of meaning, are considered. Characteristic contributions include Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner's (2002) theory of conceptual blending and its application to narrative, 11 Monika Fludernik's (1996) proposal of a cognitive 'natural' narratology, Patrick Colm Hogan's investigation of narrative universals (2003) and his more recent concept of an 'affective narratology' (2011), Alan Palmer's views on the construction of fictional minds (2004; 2010) as well as Lisa Zunshine's (2006) exploration of the relevance of mental meta-representations and Theory of Mind for the reading of fiction. What most of the approaches in this latter paradigm share, despite their diversity, is the (at least implicit) conviction that the dispositions and mechanisms of mental activity applied in the writing and/or understanding of literature have their roots in everyday cognition or are even essentially the same as those that are used also in non-literary instances of cognition. The proponents of this approach frequently see the study of mental operations evoked by literature as providing access to the astounding richness and complexity of otherwise unconscious structures and processes of the human mind. The production and reception of literature that works in such seemingly effortless ways turns out, upon closer inspection, to require the most intricate manoeuvres of the mind. This would seem to hold also for character reception.

II. Character Reception and the 'Information Processing Paradigm:' The Dynamics of Mental Model Construction Much work has been done in discourse processing since the classical studies of, say, Walter Kintsch and Teun A. van Dijk from the late 1970s on. 12 So much, in fact, that character reception theory today is faced with a veritable embarrassment of riches. It seems advisable, therefore, to look at the consensus that exists with regard to certain fundamental sets of mental operations and processing constraints, and to inquire what character theory may learn from them. There is little disagreement, if any, about the basic mechanisms of text processing. 13 Readers continually process, on various levels of complexity, information both from the text (bottom-up) and from memory storages (top-down), and correlate the two inputs with each other. It has been generally ac- cepted that information is stored in the mind in meaningful units such as schemata, frames and scripts, which may contain elaborate sequences complete with agents, spaces, objects, relationships, or in the more hierarchically shaped, classifica-

11 See Schneider and Hartner (2012) for applications; I will return to blending below in section III. 12 See Kintsch and van Dijk (1978); van Dijk and Kintsch (1983); Kintsch (1988; 1998). 13 For general monographs or collections of essays in discourse processing that contain the information used here, and that at the same time indicate the breadth and variety of approaches within this research , see Spiro, Bruce and Brewer (1980); Sanford and Garrod (1981); Flammer and Kintsch (1982); Meutsch and Viehoff (1989); Rayner and Pollatsek (1989); Balota, Flores D'Arcais and Rayner (1990); Cook (1994); Britton and Graesser (1996); van Oostendorp and Goldman (1999); Zwaan and Rapp (2006). For studies looking more particularly at literary and narrative comprehension, and thus frequently going beyond the material and questions asked by more general discourse processing re- search, see Zwaan (1993); Gerrig (1993); van Oostendorp and Zwaan (1994); Emmott (1997); Bortolussi and Dixon (2003), Emmott and Sanford (2012).

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tory form of categories. Retrieval of parts of such memory structures triggered by textual information will provide access to other elements of that structure, so that further processing is tacitly guided by the search for information matching the acti- vated pattern. This is a highly complex and dynamic process, in which entities not currently needed may be delegated to various levels of memory, from short-term to long-term working memory, so as to be accessible for later use, or even to long-term storage. 14 Also, in the course of the top-down/bottom-up interaction, readers establish inferences that engender local and global coherence, i.e., continuity of meaning and reference across sentences or even larger chunks of narrative. 15 Virtually all theories within that paradigm work with a concept of the mental representation of the infor- mation that is processed. 16 This representation, variously called mental model or situ- ation model, is both the locus and the result of the interaction of bottom-up and top- down processing. It is continually updated, modified or revised to adapt to ongoing information processing, 17 and it is likely not to represent the surface structure of the text (although it could), but rather to form an increasingly abstract propositional textbase or, at a further remove yet from the wording of the text, the scene referred to in the text, hence, a situation model. 18 Mental models – the term I am going to use – must be able to integrate information not only from all external and internal sources, but also of the most diverse quality, from propositional to visual, from abstract to concrete. 19 The knowledge of such mechanisms will inform an increasingly refined understanding of the processing of information on literary character, for top-down and bottom-up processing, inferencing and mental model construction are at the heart of character reception as well. Generally speaking, this approach leaves not doubt about how complex the frequently automatic, i.e. unconscious, operations of character understanding are, from the seemingly simple task of connecting a name or other referent with a mental representation of a character to keeping track of a character present in a scene but not referred to throughout. 20 Importantly, work done in discourse

14 For the notion of working memory as not a single short-term memory but a short-term and a long-term working memory, see Ericsson and Kintsch (1995). There are obvious correlations between assuming a long-term working memory store that facilitates access to previously activated scenes after some time, and the concept of resonance, as explained by Gerrig and McKoon (2001); see also Gerrig and Egidi (2003, 36-40) for a concise introduction. See Burke (2011) for a thorough application of various memory models to a model of the reading process. 15 On inferencing and coherence, see, e.g., Albrecht and O'Brien (1993); Graesser, Singer and Trabasso (1994). There are different attitudes as to whether inferences are established mostly automatically only to facilitate coherence or whether they are conscious hypotheses searching for confirmation. For a brief sketch of the discussion, see Gerrig and Egidi (2003). 16 For an argument against mental representation, however, cf. Green (2000). 17 See Emmott's use of the term "frame modification" (1997, chapter 5) for a similar argument. 18 For explorations of mental models of text and situation models in text comprehension, see Kintsch and van Dijk (1978); Sanford and Garrod (1981); Meutsch (1986); Garnham (1987); Albrecht and O'Brien (1993); Radvansky, Spieler and Zacks (1993); Zwaan and Radvansky (1998). 19 Most theorists hold that the mental model has this integrative power; see Garnham (1987, 28); Radvansky, Spieler and Zacks (1993) and Dutke (1996) for examples of this line of argumentation. 20 See especially Emmott (1997), who focuses on the mental instantiation of contexts to which characters are bound, speaking of 'contextual frames' as mental structures which represent the fictional situations and are necessary to make sense of information in a text; such frames are subject to a dynamic process of con- tinual updating, modification, or replacement by other frames. Emmott also demonstrates that readers may focus on particular elements within a frame once it has been triggered, and that while not all charac- ters are consciously accessible in all detail at the same time, the ones in the background still remain on the mental scene. For a further elaboration of the co-presence of characters in social spaces, see Emmott (2003).

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processing also tends to be sensitive to the dynamics of processing, pointing to the limited processing capacity of the human mind. 21 It is especially the concept of the mental model that allows us to capture this dynamic aspect also in character theory. Readers tend to be attentive to a number of aspects of a fictional situation: time, space, causality, and intentionality (Zwaan, Langston and Graesser 1995). I assume, however, that the majority of fictional situations which readers regard as relevant do not require operations of mental projections of an object's or character's motion in space, but rather a mapping of the goals, wishes and anxieties, emotions and so on, of the character (cf. Hogan 2011; Miall 2011). There is no doubt that read- ers can mentally 'move' fictional entities such as characters through imagined spaces, but this is quite unlikely to occur in isolation from the other aspects just mentioned. The metaphorical and/or metonymical of fictional space and the tradition of using space also for purposes of indirect suggest that much more is at stake when a reader does imagine a character's movement through fictional space. The mental character model, then, is mostly at the centre of narrative text processing, being the entity that 'collects' all information from textual and memory sources, includ- ing evaluations. 22 The character model may be kept in the foreground or background of the situation model, depending on textual techniques and/or reader interest, and it is subject to updating, and thus modification and revision, since character models must possess properties similar to those that have been described for situation models. Tak- ing my cue from Gerrig and Allbritton (1990) and their borrowing of a dual-coding approach of impression formation in social cognition (Brewer 1988), I contend that there are two qualitatively different types of mental models that can be constructed of characters, depending on the quality and quantity of information brought to the model from textual, i.e. bottom-up, and knowledge-based, i.e. top-down sources. The two major modes of model construction are 'categorization' and 'personalization.' If textual information and available knowledge structures allow the reader to acti- vate a category for a character, the mental model of that character is likely to be re- garded as complete at an early stage in the reading process. Little attention will be devoted to that character as long as no information contradicting the categorization is encountered; in a categorized model, which is created predominantly in top-down fashion, inferencing will be mostly automatic, and expectations of and hypotheses about that character's behaviour and attitudes will be fairly strong, even if they are not consciously formulated. The categories evoked top down may be activated from vari- ous sources: first, there are the reader's experiences with other human beings (i.e. 'social categorization' involving roles, psychological types grounded in folk psych- ology 23 ), second, his or her previous encounters with other characters in fictional worlds and knowledge of conventions, i.e. there may be 'literary categorization' based on stock characters or stereotypical agents in certain patterns, 24 and third, in slightly

21 This paradigm therefore requires us to differentiate between, among other differentiations, skilled readers and less skilled readers. 22 I admit that this concept of the character model is basically a container metaphor: the mental model is not really a 'thing' 'into' which information can be 'put.' In the light of recent neurobiology we perhaps need to understand the mental model as a co-activation of particular neural networks; however, in view of the fact that no direct correlations between neurophysiological processes and the more complex op- erations of the mind can be established at this point, the container metaphor may still be a helpful one. 23 Folk psychology plays an important role in the approach proposed by Jannidis (2004). 24 I speak of characters in fictional worlds here, not of 'literary' characters, for I believe that experience with fictional worlds in other media than the printed book will influence the reception of literary char-

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more bottom-up fashion, categorization may arise quite simply from the text's descrip- tion of a character's dispositions and acts as stable and habitual, a procedure for which I have suggested the term 'text-specific categorization.' Of course, categorization cues may activate any combination of these categorization types, and texts frequently present triggers in more than one area. Once a category has given shape to a character model, it may of course be extended and modified, in accordance with the general assumption that mental models are updated throughout reading. Very few characters in fictional texts, apart perhaps from the commedia dell'arte types of , will plausibly exist by membership of one category only. Rather, categorized models may be enriched to reach a stage of individuation , as in person perception (see Brewer 1988, 20-22), even if the mental model remains based on the original category assignation. Given the natural restrictions on discourse processing capacities, we may assume that the mind will follow a tendency to apply categorization as a preference rule (Gerrig and Allbritton 1990, 386). But at the same time, readers will expect to en- counter (at least a small number of) characters that deserve increased processing en- ergy, especially at the beginning of a narrative: readers expect to be about the meaningful experiences of interesting beings. 25 And literary texts indeed tend to present information about some characters in ways that will block categorization – the expectation that the text offers some characters worth engaging with more deeply is seldom frustrated by that want to find readers. Mental models of such charac- ters, I contend, again using the Brewer and Gerrig and Allbritton terminology, will be personalized . This means that the mental model is constructed more laboriously in the bottom-up , and the result will be a more complex structure that is kept 'open' for a longer time to allow for the integration of further, potentially conflicting infor- mation; also, inferencing will be conscious and expectations and hypotheses weaker than with the categorized characters. Whereas the above sketch of the categorized model is obviously reminiscent of E.M. Forster's description of "flat" characters in Aspects of the , the dynamics of character reception and the concept of personal- ization is at least implied in his definition of "round" characters: "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way" (Forster 1962, 81). Not only do characters exist whose very function is the creation of such convin- cing surprise, but the reader is also likely to come equipped with a mental structure flexible enough to meet the challenge of accommodating such information, i.e. the capability of creating a personalized model. A personalized mental model of a character may emerge from a constellation of various factors. First and most simply, personalization is likely to occur if no infor- mation is presented that would allow easy initial categorization. This happens when no terms triggering any categorization appear at all, which is frequently the case if a character is not characterized by the narrator or other characters before they first speak or act, but through indirect self-characterization, as for instance when s/he is presented engaged in mental activity, i.e. as a focalizer. The presentation of the activi- ties of a character's psyche through internal focalization is more than a formal re- quirement for personalization; it seems rather to be the technique that best meets the reader's personalization impulse, which may be said to govern his or her reading of

acter (in a narrow sense: characters in prose fiction). 25 See the concept of "point-driven understanding" as formulated by Vipond and Hunt (1984), which points in the same direction, and Fludernik's (1996) emphasis on criteria of when an episode is considered worth nar- rating in conversational , which may be projected onto narrative comprehension in literary texts.

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narrative fiction in the first place. Indeed, in many cases the very point of reading a fictional narrative is, it seems, to get access to the realm of other people's minds, as a number of approaches within the 'mental dispositions paradigm' suggest. Thus, Moni- ka Fludernik (1996) states that the presentation of fictional characters experiencing their world forms the backbone of narrative, as is expressed in her concept of 'experi- entiality,' and Alan Palmer (2004) emphasises that prose narrative is the fiction of minds at work; finally, Lisa Zunshine bases her entire theory of why we read fiction on ' and readers' ability – and need – "to explain people's behaviour in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs and desires" (2006, 6); and although these can be inferred from descriptions of behaviour, narrative fiction has the unmatched power to provide the illusion of immediate access to that mental world. Personalization may also be evoked if categorizations are offered which happen to be strongly contradictory or if the source of categorization (another character, usually) is deemed so unreliable that a significant degree of insecurity about category mem- bership remains. Besides being supported by internal focalization, personalization will also depend on an emotional involvement with the character in question (Gerrig and Allbritton 1990, 387). Film studies have been particularly active in studying the conditions, forms and effects of emotional response. This may not come as a surprise, for film is, as Ed Tan (1996) formulates it, an "emotion machine:"26 it is clear that film, as a notoriously 'impatient' medium, will continually trigger affective reactions (not only to characters, but also in connection with moods created by visual style, editing, music), but does printed prose narrative do the same? As in film, emotional response to literary characters may be influenced not only by reaction to the content- level, but also by the aesthetic qualities of the text. While the visual appearance of character and the aesthetics of presentation may be of greater importance in film re- ception than in literary reading (see below), the theory of film emotions has neverthe- less drawn attention to the fact that the cognitive and emotional aspects of character reception come together in reactions to character. On the basis of the reader's capacity for empathy and his or her ability to mentally represent a situation, and depending on the reader's disposition to evaluate a character as likeable or not, the states and events that a character is involved in will elicit an evaluation of the desirability of the out- come from the viewer or reader (Bryant and Zillmann 1991; Zillmann 1994). If there is a personalization tendency (or the absence of a categorization tendency) to which an invitation to empathize with a character is added, the mental model is likely not only to be of a different cognitive structure than the categorized ones, but also of a different emotional quality. Keeping in mind the importance, if not primacy, of emo- tions not only in film viewing but also in literary understanding, 27 these characters are likely to account for the most intense effects on the reader during – and probably after – narrative comprehension. Although categorization and personalization are the two opposed modes of mental model construction of character, the theory must still be flexible enough to allow for cases that do not follow the plan sketched above. Thus, if categorization and even individuation prove to be untenable in the presence of new information, the reader is required to de-categorize the character and search for a new model structure from

26 For approaches to emotion in the reception of film, including affects in relation to filmic character, see Zillmann (1994); Smith (1995); Tan (1996); Plantinga and Smith (1999). 27 See Miall (2007; 2011), Hogan (2011) and Burke on the importance of emotion in narrative under- standing.

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which to derive new expectations.28 The necessity to de-categorize involves an awareness of the fallibility of the initial categorization and is thus of prime im- portance as a reception effect. Emmott makes a general observation on the processing of narrative that is pertinent also to such phases of character reception: In general, narrative processing is, on many occasions, more a matter of weighing prob- abilities than of decoding a text by a process of rule application and deduction. Narra- tives may sometimes exploit the indeterministic nature of reading by cueing a reader to make a particular interpretation and then forcing a different interpretation on the reader at a later stage. (Emmott 1997, 174) 29 The result of de-categorization will be a temporal openness of the mental model, combined with a conscious search for explanations of the failure as well as an eager- ness to receive new information, which may then lead either to a different categoriza- tion or a completely new, personalized model. Theoretically speaking, there is no reason why a character which has been construed as a personalized mental model should not be 'de-personalized' if it turns out to be a category member more than anything else. There may be some disappointment involved in that process, but there may also be some relief at being able to use processing capacities for other characters; for particularly when they start to read a narrative, readers will, I assume, be search- ing for categorization, de-categorization and personalization cues for various charac- ters at the same time or in quick succession. De-categorization cannot be considered as having anything but a drastic effect on the reader, requiring him or her to become aware of the initial categorization ten- dency, perhaps even throwing into relief the very grounds for deriving judgments from the category. Note that original category membership need not be totally erased if the categorized model is transformed into a personalized one, but can be accepted as one element of a complex personality; the general impression of that personality – likely to be associated with positive emotions – may even reflect back onto the cate- gory and change the reader's perception of it. It is in connection with this assumed mechanism that the value of this discourse processing approach for literary interpreta- tion can be demonstrated. Culpeper's (2002) cognitive stylistics approach is reticent about producing interpretation, focusing more on providing evidence that may provide the foundation for interpretation, as is standard practice in stylistics. Also, there is the general problem that the cognitive sciences follow a tendency of looking at the context- independent, general rules and mechanisms of mental operations, whereas literary criti- cism focuses on particular meanings produced in specific circumstances. I believe that the mental-modelling approach of character reception can be used to produce historically informed interpretations on the basis of what we know about general principles of mental operations. Consider again the effect of de-categorization: this seems to be one of the aims that didactically inclined novelists tend to pursue, employing various techniques for the purpose. Think of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Ruth of 1853 in which the protagonist is likely to be cast into the category of the fallen woman in the first part of the text;

28 See, again, Emmot (1997) who speaks of a frame switch for the replacing of one situational frame by another. A similar process is likely to be active in character reception. 29 See also Margolin's comment on the effect of watching failures in cognition in the fictional world: "The fictional presentation of cognitive mechanisms in action, especially of their breakdown or failure, is itself a powerful cognitive tool which may make us aware of actual cognitive mechanisms, and, more specifically, of our own mental functioning" (2003, 278).

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later, the text invites its readers to perceive Ruth differently. There is a change in Ruth's understanding and behaviour, arrived at in accordance with the doctrine of introspection, self-knowledge and repentance central to evangelical faith; Gaskell also invites emotional involvement by the clever strategy of presenting Ruth very sparing- ly as a focalizer, and then not at the moment of the seduction (about which the text is silent for reasons of decency anyway), but in her repentance afterwards and, perhaps more importantly, in the moments when she considers her love for her child, which aims at a core element of Victorian sentimentalism. These strategies are likely to create the emotional involvement required for personalization. By presenting the ostracism Ruth suffers through Mr Bradshaw and his most unchristian refusal to forgive as extreme and unfair reactions to the initial categorization, Gaskell, I believe, succeeds in making at least some readers see the negative evaluation tendencies involved in as- signing a person to the category of a fallen woman in a new light. The readers' habitual categorization tendencies will thus lead them to a certain categorization of a character at the beginning, but later the prejudicial implications of social categorization are high- lighted, thus either necessitating a de-categorization followed by a personalization, or suggesting a re-categorization of that character in more positive terms. I have also tried to show that Victorian authors tended to invite personalization for characters whose unconventional personalities cannot be accommodated by social categories, in spite of other characters' attempts at categorizing them (Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë's novel, Mr. Harding in Anthony Trollope's The Warden , Helen Graham in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall , Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss ), furthermore, that the popular and sensational novel (e.g., Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret , Bram Stoker's Dracula ) can be read as an exercise in re-affirming gender categorizations through presenting them as potentially endangered categories, and that authors may even decide to restrict to categorization if they wish to contribute to social personality theories, as in the case of the late-Victorian New Woman novel (George Gissing's The Odd Women , Sara Grand's The Heavenly Twins ). 30 In further applications of the theory, it might be shown that in the transition from the Victorian to the modernist novel authors' willingness to even suggest categorization decreased significantly. This can be seen in the modernist novel's use of variable internal focalization, the increasing covertness of the narrators (the primary agency of category evocation in the days of the Victorian novel) or even in the modernist concern with failure of mutual understanding on the level of the characters. And since they serve as major sources of information for the reader in less narrator-centred texts, modernist characters are likely to create exactly that kind of insecurity; think only of the mistaken attempts at categorization that John Dowell, the unreliable homodiegetic narrator of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier keeps making, and the insecurities produced in the reader by this strategy, or the struggle of Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse to come to terms with the members of the Ramsay family and their guests. I have outlined ways of applying my theory to specific sets of texts from literary history. However, Fotis Jannidis has justifiably criticized my approach for postulating too close an alignment between the intended reception effects and actual reading processes (2004, 181-185), and this shortcoming becomes particularly obvious in a historical perspective. I have to admit that my theory simply worked best with the

30 See Schneider (2000).

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'realist' Victorian novel, and that things get even more complicated when we turn to post-modern characters. In the post-modern novel the artificiality of the characters is sometimes drastically highlighted, so that emotional involvement may be difficult to maintain. What is more, in the light of poststructuralist concepts of instable or frag- mented identity, we must face the question whether and to what extent readers can still successfully approach such characters with folk-psychological concepts of per- sonality. As Liesbeth Korthals Altes points out in her discussion of the ethical impli- cations of characterization (chapter 4 in her forthcoming book on Ethos and Narrative Interpretation ), criticizing my model for the simplicity of the distinctions it makes, it may depend on the individual reader of such texts whether personalization or catego- rization occurs. Though I understand Jannidis' and Korthals Altes' unease with the near-structuralist, schematic flavour of my classificatory distinctions, I would still maintain that the major tendencies of character reception can and ought to be treated as distinct types of information processing – I would find the assumption implausible that character models can be personalized and categorized at the same time. I do agree, however, that a process model which is sensitive to the complexity of actual reading processes would have to feature some sort of interim phase in the construc- tion of mental character models, and that it would have to take into consideration more reader-related factors than did my original proposal.

III. Open Questions, Further Perspectives and the 'Mental Dispositions Paradigm' Due to its grounding in the discourse processing paradigm the character-as-mental- model approach inherits a number of problems from that area. While there is no doubt that readers mentally represent the contents of a text, it needs to be explored in more detail in connection with characters and characterization what that representation 'looks like.' To be able to carry all information on a character that the reader encoun- ters in the text and activates from memory, the mental models must be able to inte- grate information of all kinds, including text, oppositions, images, and feelings. When reading about Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë's novel of that name, for instance, we can mentally activate her indignation and shame at being called a 'liar' when introduced to Lowood school, her yearning for comfort and disappointment at Rochester's marriage to Bertha Mason, her criticism of St John Rivers' emotional frigidity, and also her plainness in looks and perhaps style of clothing. In the process of reading and in re- membering that character, the mental model may also activate snippets of text the reader found memorable, as well as remarkable actions. It seems likely that the word- ing of the text is recalled less over time, as is generally the case with the recall of stories. It is clear that in reading literary texts information from other sources than visu- al ones comes into , but I would be surprised to learn that none of the aspects of visual person perception enter the mental 'picture' of a character. In connection with mental , the strongest claims have been made for the theory that visual percep- tion and mental imagery share common mechanisms. Kosslyn (1994) sums up that, although the precise mechanisms have not yet been fully explored, "we have good evi- dence that image representations are depictive," and the mental pictures are likely to be two-dimensional, but isomorphic mappings of visual experience" (405). If readers men- tally project real world images while reading narrative, to what extent do they project their habits of social cognition onto character reception, and do visual images play a role there? In social cognition, person perception will necessarily include automatic

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category assignment according to such visible parameters as age, sex, race and so forth. 31 In spite of some work on visualisation in narrative understanding (see Esrock 2005), it has remained unexplained so far how much and in what ways precisely visual imagination enters the mental character model. As with other areas of character recep- tion, individual readers may activate entirely different visual representation strategies. In considering the visual nature of mental character representation, more is at stake than the mere question of the representational mode, for the stereotyping tendency that is involved when people take in visual impressions of other people and project social differentiations onto these images may interact with, support or work against categori- zation or personalization tendencies, and that will add a whole layer of complexity to my model. I believe that this issue becomes especially powerful in writing that presents characters from ethnic contexts which differ from that of the reader. How does the 'white' reader imagine the multi-ethnic cast of characters of, say, Zadie Smith's White Teeth or the almost exclusively Asian cast of Monica Ali's Brick Lane ? Does it make a whether the reader's mental model incorporates notions of skin colour or not, and do mental representations of a character by readers who share that character's eth- nicity differ from those who do not? To put the question in a nutshell: is reading 'colour blind,' and if it is not, what are the consequences? The whole complex of alterity in literary works would need to be aligned with research in mental images of characters. Another shortcoming of my approach was that it did not acknowledge that indi- vidual literary characters hardly ever appear in the fictional world on their own. The focus was clearly, and perhaps unduly, on single characters, perhaps because of the underlying tendency of the discourse processing approach to view, for the practicali- ties of empirical testing, isolated chunks of information. This tendency appears to have precluded theorists from engaging with the actual complexity of character con- nectedness in literature (Emmott 1997, 295). In the meantime, approaches have been developed in the mental dispositions paradigm that may help address the issue of character s, in the plural. Alan Palmer (2010), for instance, has convincingly criticised narratology for disregarding the fact that the fictional minds we encounter in novels almost always work in connection with the minds of the other characters in that narra- tive. Reader's mental character models must be able to deal with that fact. According to Lisa Zunshine (2006), the mind has at its command a meta-representational ability that allows readers not only to mentally represent information, but also to include in that representation the memory of such circumstances as the source, time and place of the information. 32 The two proposals are important additions to character reception theory, because they allow us to hypothesize that utterances of other characters or narrators may reflect back and will be integrated into the mental models which the reader forms both of the character who is characterised and the source of that charac- terisation. Take Maggie Tulliver in Eliot's Mill on the Floss as an example: The read- er may mentally represent and remember that Maggie is judged a disappointment by her mother and her aunts Pullet, Glegg and Dean, and contrasted to her blonde, almost angelic cousin Lucy Dean, a paragon of filial wish-fulfilment. However, this set of information is quite unlikely to result in a mental model of Maggie into which merely

31 For a survey of cognitive mechanisms of person perception see Jones (1990). I speak of 'sex' and 'race' here rather than of 'gender' and 'ethnicity' because I take the latter terms to be the result of conscious reflection on a broad spectrum of social, cultural, political aspects of the former, which appear to be categories of differentiation that are automatically activated. 32 Cf. Hartner (2012, 115-125) for an exploration of Zunshine's approach with a view to character reception.

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the negative item 'disappointment' is encoded. Rather, the mental representation of disappointment in Maggie's model is likely to carry the tag 'in the eyes of her mother and aunts,' and the mental models of these four women will carry the information 'sources of unjust evaluations of Maggie;' similarly, the positive evaluation of Lucy will not make it into the model of that character without carrying the tag of the poten- tially untrustworthy providers of the information. Characterization, i.e. the sum of all character-relevant information that may be integrated in the mental model, will thus also include information on who has said what about a character and what that means to both the character and the characterizers. The co-presence of characters in the story world may be one incentive for mental- ly establishing relations between characters, as Emmott (2003) emphasizes, but is certainly not a necessary condition. Remember, for instance, your impression of the strength of the relationship between the eponymous protagonists in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet , and compare that to the following facts: together they have only some 280 lines (less than a tenth of the play), they share a meagre three scenes (four, if we include the last one, in which they do not communicate), but they spend a con- siderable amount of time on stage individually (Romeo is present in fourteen scenes, Juliet in nine, among them some of the longest in the play). Similarly, the French lieutenant of the title of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman is always somehow 'there,' although the man of course never appears in person in the story; and, to quote one last example, the fact that Oliver Twist and his greedy and brutal half- brother Monks do not meet in the latter part of Dickens' novel allows the author to pre- sent Oliver's new haven of safety, the Maylie household, as so much more endangered, and in addition to the thirty characters in that story, there is a handful of deceased per- sons who are nevertheless likely to be mentally represented by readers, such as Agnes Fleming (who even appeared in an illustration for the readers of the original edition), Oliver's mother and Rose Maylie's sister. These examples indicate that readers must be able to establish mental connections on other grounds than co-presence. Marcus Hartner (2008, 2011) has developed a model of the interaction of charac- ter perspectives that uses Fauconnier and Turner's (2002) theory of conceptual inte- gration/blending to explain both the dynamics and the effects of the inter-relatedness of the various characters' perspectives. Hartner views the individual characters' per- spectives as mental input spaces in a conceptual integration network. The two (or more) perspectives are projected into another mental space, the blend, on the basis of partial structural similarities, but without disregarding the differences between them. A new meaning structure emerges in the blend that centres on the dissonances and consonances which may exist between the perspectives. The important point about Hartner's approach is that it does not explain simply in terms of confrontation of incompatible perspectives. Rather, it regards the insights gained by the blending of perspectives brought into connection as a reading effect which leaves none of the mental spaces involved in the network unaffected. Backward projection from the blend back to the input spaces will make the inputs appear in a different light. As we saw in the case of Maggie Tulliver, that her view of life is markedly distinct from that of most other people in her town has its effecet on the mental representation of all characters involved. What is more, the new meaning emerging from the blending of perspectives can itself be further processed according to the principles of completion, and elaboration as outlined by Fauconnier and Turner for blended spaces in general. Since the number of input spaces is not limited to two and since they can

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consist of the perspectives even of characters who never meet, this approach covers a much broader range of reading effects evoked by the presentation of two or more char- acters in prose narrative than did previous proposals, including my own.

IV. Conclusion Character, and the way that readers engage with character, deserves a prominent place in narrative theory. A cognitive approach suggests that in the production as well as the reception of stories, human beings think of characters as human beings first. This postulate may of course be countered with pointing out that what differentiates prose fiction from other manifestations of the imaginary is narrative technique, not charac- ter, for it is obvious that fictional characters can be found also in film, drama, , comic strips, video games, opera, ballet, the puppet show and all kinds of other media . My answer would be that precisely because this is the case we need to be aware of the differences in character construction in the various media. I have sug- gested that to take a closer look at mental model construction as depending on text- and reader-related factors may pave the way for more detailed analyses along these lines. I also believe that a central requirement for future developments in the reader- oriented study of character is to explore to what extent readers' previous encounters with characters in other media than prose narrative influence character reception. Even if the cognitive approach promises a more sophisticated understanding of the dynamic processes of character reception than any of the previous contributions to character theory, it does of course not automatically produce 'better' readings of literary texts. The task of interpretation still lies with the individual reader or critic, whether he or she employs the cognitive-critical took-kit or not. Very few of our interpretive efforts will be clinically testable for quite some time, and even if they were, that would not necessarily improve the quality of the interpretation or restrict the range of potential other interpretations. The cognitive approach is likely to demystify some of the com- plex operations involved in creating and receiving literary character and enable us to speak about potential reception effects in detail, but it will not in the process reduce the fascinating richness of reactions. If anything, the cognitive approach points to the utter variety of the cognitive and emotional activities triggered in readers who encounter beings in fictional worlds. I hope that if we continue to incorporate theories, models and data on cognition and emotion from the further development in the cognitive sciences, we will be able to continually improve our understanding of why and how character is so central.

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Anglistik, Jahrgang 24 (2013), Ausgabe 2 © 2013 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg

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