Latin American Populism in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

There is still little consensus among scholars regarding how best to characterize the relation-ship between readers of fictional narratives and the characters in those narratives.1 Part of the problem is that many of the explanatory concepts used in the debate-concepts like identification and empathy-are somewhat vague or ambiguous. In this article, I consider some recent relevant empirical research on text processing and narrative comprehension and argue for a pluralist account of character engagement, in which empathy plays an import-ant role. In Section I, I review several empirical studies that strongly suggest that readers often adopt the perspective of one or more of the characters in fictional narratives. In Section II, I turn to the concept of empathy and provide an explanation of empathy based on models and research in empirical psychology. I focus in particular on self-other differentiation, a critical feature of empathy that has been underempha-sized in the literature. Next I discuss two psychological phenomena that are closely related to empathy and often confused or conflated with it: emotional contagion and sympathy. In the final section of the paper, I employ the account of empathy developed in Section II to address Noel Carroll's objections to the view that readers typically empathize with fictional characters. I. EMPIRICAL RESEARCH ON TEXT PROCESSING AND NARRATIVE COMPREHENSION In spite of a growing trend in philosophical aesthetics to take seriously the work of cognitive scientists, much of the recent empirical research on text processing and narrative comprehension has not yet been brought to bear on the philo-sophical debate regarding readers' relation-ships to fictional characters. In this section, I discuss several studies that examine the activ-ities involved in narrative comprehension. This research provides an important source of empir-ical support for the claim that adopting the perspective of fictional characters typically plays an important part in our engagement with narratives. Several recent empirical studies indicate that readers tend to adopt a position within the spatio-temporal framework of narratives that is based on the position of the protagonist.2 In a repre-sentative study, Rinck and Bower ran a series of experiments on the focus of readers' attention.3 They had readers memorize the diagram of a building and objects located within it. Readers then read narratives describing characters' activ-ities and movements in that building. While reading, they were probed with target sentences referring to memorized objects within the build-ing's rooms. The consistent finding was that readers were able to process the target sentences describing objects close to the current location of the protagonist much faster than target sen-tences describing objects that were farther away from the protagonist or that had been visited by the protagonist earlier in the narrative. Based on this finding, Rinck and Bower concluded that readers were experiencing the narrative from the spatiotemporal standpoint of the protagonist. In other words, readers were mentally moving through the building with the protagonist. Another study suggesting that readers typically take up characters' perspectives was conducted by Black, Turner, and Bower.4 Black et al. hypothesized that if readers adopt the point of view of a particular character early on The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62:2 Spring 2004