Читательские стратегии преодоления когнитивного диссонанса при восприятии образов персонажей в романе Б. Ю. Поплавского «Аполлон Безобразов»

Abstract

The aim of the study is to determine the specifics of the mental procedures associated with the reader’s change in psychological attitude to the character’s image and resistance to imagination as alternative strategies for overcoming cognitive dissonance in the perception of the novel “Apollo Bezobrazov” by B. Yu. Poplavsky. The choice of this research material is predetermined by the fact that in this text, both strategies reveal different degrees of intensity, there are zones in which changes in the reader’s psychological attitude to the character’s image are not consistently determined, while resistance to imagination is weak. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the mediated nature of dissonance is established: it is a consequence of friction between the reader and the character’s worldview. The results showed that the reader’s cognitive dissonance is a key mechanism for the perception of B. Yu. Poplavsky’s fiction narrative, especially when focusing on the characters’ implicit internal contradictions. The reader’s cognitive empathy with the protagonist is activated by the author by manipulating narrative transitions from the narrator’s omniscient focus on the protagonist’s views from within (or internal focuses) to his direct speech.