Crying, Moving, and Keeping It Whole: What Makes Literary Description Vivid?

Abstract

Vividness is used in a range of senses which often conflate the intensity of an experience with the accuracy of mental images. In this article we consider the vividness of responses to literary descriptions of faces in the light of the psychology of face perception and the neuroscience of the mirror neuron system. We distinguish between intensity of experience and accuracy of mental images and compare two models of reader response to descriptions: the jigsaw model (the reader constructs a mental image from items of verbal information) and the experiential model (the reader has an emotional, embodied, and holistic response). We predict which aspects of facial description will provoke a vivid response in the experiential sense and discuss examples of literary descriptions of faces in the light of these predictions. We conclude with an illustration of how these insights can be used in literary history and interpretation.