Exploring Narratives’ Powers of Emotional Persuasion through Character Involvement: A Working Heuristic

Abstract

AbstractNarratives change people’s minds. This has been shown as early as forty-five years ago, but recently, the persuasive and emotional effects of narratives have received fresh attention, as well as emotions themselves. Both psychology and literature researchers have begun to investigate the particularities of the emotional functioning of narratives and how they persuade, i. e. influence attitudes through having readers experience emotions. Their research, combined with recent apprais­al theories of vicarious (i. e. other-oriented) emotions, indicates that the emotional effects of a narrative can be hypothesized about by critics through analyzing the text itself, i. e. the textual situations that characters are placed in and how the contextualized readers may simulate and appraise these situations. These findings, however, have not yet been turned into a workable heuristic which would allow literary critics to analyse textual narratives for their emotional and persuasive effect. I set out to do so in this paper.First, I summarize recent research conducted on and theories proposed for the emotional effect of character involvement in narratives. Especially noteworthy are Howard Sklar’sSklar’s approach incorporates an everyday understanding of ›sympathy‹, i. e. of feeling sorry or pity for someone. His study – forming a hypothesis through analysis, testing it empirically, and ensuring inter-coder-variability – is to be commended, I would argue, however, that sympathy covers only a small amount of the possible vicarious emotions a reader may feel while experiencing a narrative.Keen, the only one to use empathy, not sympathy, in her title, doubts that reading narratives (in particular high-brow literature) directly leads to acts of altruism. In her study, she does not primarily develop a heuristic for hypothesizing on empirical reader response, but deconstructs researchers’, readers’ and writers’ attitudes concerning narrative and empathy, and consequently proposes a heuristic for analyzing authorial strategies of empathy, which does not seem suitable for predicting contextualized reader response.Thus I turn to empirical research on narrative emotional persuasion (Ch. 2). Scholars concerned have found that narratives are more likely than expository texts to lead to attitude changes, and they have linked the degree (quantity) of attitude change to the degree ofI propose to operationalize the text-situated character-focused conditions of appraisal and the process of appraisal itself as follows:I then sketch an analysis of Suzanne Collins’ immensely successful ›dysto­pian‹ novel