Abstract
This article examines recent theories of fictional characters, and raises the issue of how far characters can be understood with reference to human intersubjectivity. On the one hand, empirical res...
Highlights
IntroductionAs teachers of literature frequently remind their students, fictional characters are not real people
As teachers of literature frequently remind their students, fictional characters are not real people. This tension between the artifice of fiction and the ways that readers process fictional characters is at the heart of this article, in which we examine the results and methodological implications of an empirical study of readers’ sympathy and empathy
Based on cross-table and chi2 tests that were run between a combination of questions #1 and #2 and question #6, it was determined that readers’ sympathy for the character did not seem to depend on the awareness of Charlie’s disability, but appeared in responses from both those who did identify that feature and those who did not [p = 0.136]
Summary
As teachers of literature frequently remind their students, fictional characters are not real people This tension between the artifice of fiction and the ways that readers process fictional characters is at the heart of this article, in which we examine the results and methodological implications of an empirical study of readers’ sympathy and empathy. The study, conducted by Sklar, showed that adolescent Finnish readers felt sympathy for the intellectually disabled protagonist in Daniel Keyes’s novel Flowers for Algernon. Our discussion of these results shows that in order to understand how readers imagine fictional characters we need to draw on both empirical and theoretical research
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