Fictional Characters as Transworld Individuals

This paper considers two issues raised by the claim that fictional characters are abstract artifacts. First, given that artifacts normally have functions, what is the function of a fictional character? Second, given that, in experiencing works of fictions, we usually treat fictional characters as concrete individuals, how can such a phenomenology fit with an ontology according to which fictional characters are abstract artifacts? I will indirectly address the second issue by directly addressing the first one. For this purpose, I will rely on the notion of a mental file. I will argue that the function of fictional characters is the generation of mental files of a special kind. I will show that our experience of fictional characters as concrete individuals depends on the kind of mental files that are generated by fictional characters as abstract artifacts. I will conclude that an appreciator of a work of fiction can open two files about a certain fictional character; one about the character as an individual in the fictional world, and the other about the character as an abstract artifact in the actual world. In this sense, our relation to a fictional character is characterized by a duality of files or ‘twofileness’.

Abstract: This introduction to the special issue "Connecting Characters in Modern and Contemporary French-language Fiction" offers a critical context for studying character networks and interdependency. Through the lens of Glissant's concept of "Relation" and in dialogue with Jagoda's notion of "network aesthetics," the issue examines what connects characters in fictional works, how these links shape narrative meaning within and across texts, and how character interdependency reflects diverse social, political, and historical contexts. From the nineteenth-century novel to the multi-perspectival fictions of today, the issue attests to a shift in our critical understanding of characters, from a focus on individual centrality to movement within community.

AMY CHRISTINE PARKER University of Manitoba The book Light, with Monet at Giverny: A Novel is a story that imaginatively describes a day in the life of the Monet family. It is written by one of the feminist writers of the first wave which ended in the seventies, ‘‘Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Eva Figes, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, and Kate Millett’’, as described by Susan Watkins in Twentieth Century Women Novelists: Feminist Theory into Practice. Watkins’ book describes these women as being opposed to contemporary interpretations of Freudian theory, and in particular to certain aspects of his description of the Oedipus complex which they see as patriarchal and arising from capitalist values and the hypothesis that hysteria is self-motived rather than a problem of sexuality. Yet what Sally Robinson recognizes in Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction as the refreshing plurality of the voices of these feminist authors is characteristic as well of those who remain faithful to religion or Christianity, which are traditionally feminine voices. This paper searches for the developing voice of women in this work of fiction by Eva Figes and recognizes as well the presence of the continuing male voices. A positive aspect of Figes’ novels is the fact that she often finds a way for a character to thrive despite harsh conditions. Throughout the novel, exterior sounds such as a clock counting the hours, a nearby passing train, singing birds and galloping horses create some sonorous effects. As the land lies amongst hills and a river, echoes can also be heard. These sounds punctuate the dialogues and silences within which much of the meaning of the story is contained. In this novel about an artistic family, the auditory effects are enhanced by visual motifs of light and color. In another of her novels, The Knot, there is a similar recurrence of ‘[n]ot

Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed to imagine. Most other theories of thought and discourse about fictional characters either fail to capture the intentionality of our imaginings, or else obscure the differences between imaginings directed toward fictional characters and those directed toward real individuals. I argue that once we have an account of prescriptions to imagine about real individuals, we can adapt the same framework to specify the contents of prescriptions to imagine about fictional characters, and thereby to account for the truth (or falsity) of statements about fictional characters.

.

This paper deals with phenomenological distinctions concerning empathy with real persons and empathy with fictional characters. We will introduce both contemporary accounts of our perception of others and Edith Stein’s account of empathy. These theories will turn out to be fruitful in defending our main thesis, i.e. that the differences between empathy with real people and empathy with fictional characters are not structural but just qualitative. We will argue that in both cases empathy is a direct act of perceiving others and their lived experience. However, stemming from Stein’s work, we will underline that empathy with real persons is in principio more vivid and intense than empathy with fictional characters. In order to identify similarities and differences between empathy de vivo and empathy in fiction, we will focus on the following issues: the quality of perception; the motivational context and the “life-world context”; the ontological status of persons vs. characters.

The illusion of independent agency (IIA) occurs when a fictional character is experienced by the person who created it as having independent thoughts, words, and/or actions. Children often report this sort of independence in their descriptions of imaginary companions. This study investigated the extent that adult writers experience IIA with the characters they create for their works of fiction. Fifty fiction writers were interviewed about the development of their characters and their memories for childhood imaginary companions. Ninety-two percent of the writers reported at least some experience of IIA. The writers who had published their work had more frequent and detailed reports of IIA, suggesting that the illusion could be related to expertise. As a group, the writers scored higher than population norms in empathy, dissociation, and memories for childhood imaginary companions.

It is commonly presupposed that there are no decisive differences between empathy with fictional characters on one hand and empathy with real persons on the other. I distinguish two types of processes of affect recognition "Perceptual Affect Recognition" and "Affective Affect Recognition". The consensus view about empathy with fictional characters has to be challenged if "empathy" refers to the former or the latter process because of the significant differences between the fictional and the non-fictional scenario: firstly, readers as "empathizers" cannot perceive the fictional target person directly but only the literary text. This is especially problematic for Affective State Recognition. Secondly, fictional characters do not exist, at least not in the sense that they are real people or entities with mental states which leads to relevant differences of the accuracy conditions of Affective Affect Recognition in the fictional and the nonfictional scenario.

Although fictional characters have long dominated the reception of literature, films, television programs, comics, and other media products, only recently have they begun to attract their due attention in literary and media theory. The book systematically surveys today´s diverse and at times conflicting theoretical perspectives on fictional character, spanning research on topics such as the differences between fictional characters and real persons, the ontological status of characters, the strategies of their representation and characterization, the psychology of their reception, as well as their specific forms and constellations in - and across - different media, from the book to the internet.

In this article, I want to defend two claims. First, as regards fictional characters (ficta), one must appeal to constitutive properties, i.e., properties that are not only necessary but also essential for a fictum involved by a certain narration; namely, the internal discourse about a fictum. Such properties are indeed the properties that are truly predicated of ficta, either explicitly or implicitly, in that narration. For the appeal to such properties may explain not only i) the truth of important bits of external discourse, i.e., the discourse concerning a fictum outside that narration, but also ii) a fictum’s individuation, i.e., what makes that fictum the object it is. Second, ficta are truly internally predicated such properties, i.e., they possess such properties in a specific, constitutive, mode. For those properties are members of the property sets with which ficta are somehow correlated; indeed, possession of truly internally predicated properties precisely amounts to set-membership.

Sister Mokran (2012) and Those Who Cross The Line (2018) both concern the border between South and North Korea and those who have crossed it from the North to the South. I argue that these staged dramas invite the audience into a heterotopia where the South-North border is symbolically blurred or spatially reinterpreted, as are the past and the present, and the social and the staged realities. In Sister Mokran, heterotopia is generated through the corporeal co-presence of two North Korean migrants on a thrust stage – a fictional character and a real person – and the complicated relationality between them. The spatial reinterpretation of the South-North border as a heterotopic zone in Those Who Cross The Line and border-crossing characters from both sides therein allow the audience to perceive a realised utopia on stage beyond the border in reality. In this article, in my critical and theoretical exploration of the two plays, I argue that the staged heterotopias are created through staged bodies, mise-en-scéne, and stage structure. In doing so, my research develops an in-depth understanding of the Korean theatrical public sphere, particularly regarding how contemporary South Korean theatre engages with the socio-politics of the border and those who cross it.

The central character of literature has more than often been a fictional character around which the entire work revolved. The author treats and portrays the character as per his own preferences and demand of the work to ardently ascertain the thought which he conceived and wished to disseminate. These thoughts have no limitations and the character which is conceived by the author reflects the ideas of the author. This fictional character becomes analogous to a real living character having all the traits and mannerism of a real person and these fictional characters may not only be humans but they may be non-humans or animals. There are numerous such fictional characters which have become so popular that the element of fiction in its personality has been long way given with and it has assumed the position of a real human in the society. People sometime begin to believe them to be real humans and tend to identify themselves with such characters. The popularity of such fictional characters establishes its marketability and thus it assumes characteristics of a property. Once the element of profitability creeps in debate over its ownership and protection begins. In this paper an attempt is made to discuss fictional characters, their creation, ownership, and protection if any under the Indian copyright laws.

<i>Character and Person</i>. John Frow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi+331.

If we are to postulate fictional characters at all, it seems advisable to postulate them as entities that can satisfy or at least make sense of our most important beliefs and practices concerning them. Often theories of fiction are driven not by an independent sense of what is needed to understand talk and practices regarding fiction, but rather by a desire to show how fictional characters may find their place in a preconceived ontology of possible, nonexistent, or abstract objects – to demonstrate one more useful application of the ontology under discussion, or to provide catchy and familiar examples. Instead of starting from a ready-made ontology and seeing how we can fit fictional characters into it, I suggest that we begin by paying careful attention to our literary practices so that we can see what sorts of things would most closely correspond to them. I thus begin by discussing what sorts of entities our practices in reading and discussing works of fiction seem to commit us to, and I draw out the artifactual theory of fiction as a way of characterizing the sort of entity that seems best suited to do the job of fictional characters. WHAT FICTIONAL CHARACTERS SEEM TO BE Fictional objects as I discuss them here include such characters as Emma Woodhouse, Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet, and Tom Sawyer – characters who appear in works of literature and whose fortunes we follow in reading those works. In our everyday discussions of literature we treat fictional characters as created entities brought into existence at a certain time through the acts of an author.

Author of the television drama The Wire, David Simon with Eric Overmyer launched a new series entitled Treme on the American channel HBO in April, 2010. Located in the heart of New Orleans, Tremé is a neighborhood known for its unique cultural, social, and historical context. It is the oldest African American neighborhood in the United States, the birthplace of the Black civil right movement in the South and the home of Jazz. Categorized as a drama by David Simon, the series is a work of fiction. Yet it also depicts day-to-day life in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, referencing real events, real people, real places, and real cultural symbols. Relying on the work of Schaeffer and Esquenazi, this article links fiction to reality with an analysis of historical truths though fictional characters’ narratives. With this methodology, we examine the film-makers’ perspective, and uncover the political intentionality of the series as an act of denunciation against the dysfunctions of the local, state, and federal institutions in responding to the Katrina catastrophe. The political message of the series is also an act of testimony and homage about the daily lives and struggles of New Orleanians in a post-Katrina era.