The processing of fictional characters: A synthesis of Culpeper's and Pettersson's models

Abstract

In the last few decades, fictional characterisation has become an issue of an exceptionally big interest in cognitive science. Among many other important works in this area of research, Jonathan Culpeper's cognitive stylistic model is a particularly worthy contribution, which provides pragmatic and cognitive explanations for various insights regarding fictional character processing. This paper proposes that there is a way of further elucidating the picture of characterisation by bringing into Culpeper's model Anders Pettersson's perspective on characterisation, emerging from his cluster conception. The explanation of how this perspective can be added to Culpeper's work will be provided in terms of similarities and differences between their models. My chief aim is to provide an interdisciplinary synthesis of the two models and apply the ideas coming from two different research directions to Sherwood Anderson's story "Mother" from the Winesburg, Ohio cycle.