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Characters in Fictional Worlds Understan PDF
Characters in Fictional Worlds Understan PDF
Characters in Fictional Worlds Understan PDF
Revisionen
Grundbegriffe der Literaturtheorie
Herausgegeben
von
Fotis Jannidis
Gerhard Lauer
Matı́as Martı́nez
Simone Winko
De Gruyter
Characters in Fictional Worlds
Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film,
and Other Media
Edited
by
Jens Eder
Fotis Jannidis
Ralf Schneider
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-023241-7
e-ISBN 978-3-11-023242-4
Our heartfelt thanks go to Marcus Willand for the editorial work on this
project. Without his indefatigable support, care, and patience this volume
would not have been printed. Sarah Böhmer, Mareike Brandt, Daniel
Bund, Anne Diekjobst, Sebastian Eberle, Christian Maintz and Maike
Reinerth joined forces with him, and we would like to express our grati-
tude to them, too.
Some of the chapters were translated into English, for which we thank the
translators, Wolfram Karl Köck, Alison Rosemary Köck and Michael
Pätzold. Thanks are also due to Wallace Bond Love for last-minute
language support.
The editors
Content
Content
Introduction
JENS EDER / FOTIS JANNIDIS / RALF SCHNEIDER
Characters in Fictional Worlds. An Introduction .................................... 3
I General Topics
HENRIETTE HEIDBRINK
Fictional Characters in Literary and Media Studies. A Survey
of the Research ............................................................................................67
MARIA E. REICHER
The Ontology of Fictional Characters .................................................. 111
PATRICK COLM HOGAN
Characters and Their Plots ..................................................................... 134
Bibliography
JENS EDER / FOTIS JANNIDIS / RALF SCHNEIDER
Characters in Fictional Worlds. A Basic Bibliography ....................... 571
Introduction
JENS EDER / FOTIS JANNIDIS / RALF SCHNEIDER
of other items – from advertisements to wine – that have accumulated throughout the
world on the two most famous characters in literature.1
Terminology already posits a problem for a general or comparative
approach that wants to examine (maybe even equally ›famous‹) characters
across those media: We have to subsume readers, hearers, viewers, users,
and players under the heading of ›recipients‹, and books, paintings, radio
plays, films, video games, etc. under the heading of ›texts‹.2 (Coming from
literature and moving image studies, the authors of this introduction are
aware of their limited disciplinary perspectives in trying to give a general
survey of the field.)
Moreover, in any media, characters confront those who are concerned
with them – creators, audiences, critics and commentators – with
numerous questions. These questions can be clustered into three groups
concerning the analysis and interpretation of characters.
1. In the production phase of a media product, authors, filmmakers and
other media producers are mainly confronted with the question of how
characters can be crafted in a way that allows them to evoke certain
thoughts, feelings and lasting effects in the target audience. Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle had to invent Holmes in the first place, screenwriters had
to adapt him, casting agents had to cast an actor for the role, etc.
2. The interpretation of a work of fiction confronts critics and scholars
with the question of how characters can be understood, interpreted
and experienced, and by which stylistic devices they are shaped.
3. Studies in the fields of cultural theory and sociology consider
characters as signs of empirical production and reception processes
embedded in their socio-cultural contexts in different historical periods
and (sub-)cultures. The master sleuth Holmes, for instance, has been
read in connection with the socio-cultural developments of a modern,
industrialised society.
Each of these three fields of inquiry – production, interpretation and
cultural analysis – has prompted scholars to find answers and develop
_____________
1 De Waal: Holmes <http://special.lib.umn.edu/rare/ush/ush.html#Introduction>
(Jul. 21st, 2008).
2 When we use the term ›text‹ in this introduction, we include literature, everyday
language, film – and, indeed, all other utterances in which characters may occur.
Following Mosbach: Bildermenschen – Menschenbilder, p. 73, we might define text to
mean ›complex, coherent utterances based on signs, which are contained in a media
format, and, in their totality, communicative and culturally coded‹ (German original:
›komplexe, aber formal begrenzte, kohärente und [als Ganze] kommunikative, kulturell
kodierte Zeichenäußerungen‹; on film as text, see montage/av: Film als Text, and
Hickethier: Film- und Fernsehanalyse, pp. 23–25.
Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 5
theories. For the first two thousand years of the debate, the first set of
questions was tackled mainly by practitioners – dramatists and directors,
artists and media producers – with a view to practical concerns. It was
only in the 19th century that a more theoretical, descriptive and systematic
analysis of characters was developed in various disciplines of scholarship,
such as literary studies, theatre studies, and later in film and media studies,
communication studies, the history of art, philosophy and psychology.
Each of these disciplines has produced diverse rival theories on which we
can only cast a passing glance in this introduction (for a more detailed
survey of the research, see the contribution by Henriette Heidbrink in this
volume).
Simplifying matters for the purposes of clarity, we can point to four
dominant paradigms that reach across disciplines but have different
tenets, emphases and methods.
1. Hermeneutic approaches view characters dominantly as representations
of human beings and emphasise the necessity of taking into considera-
tion the specific historical and cultural background of the characters
and their creators.
2. Psychoanalytic approaches concentrate on the psyche of both characters
and recipients. They aim at explaining the inner life of characters, as
well as the reactions of viewers, users, and readers with the help of
psycho-dynamic models of personality (e.g., those developed by Freud
and Lacan).
3. Structuralist and semiotic approaches in contrast highlight the very
difference between characters and human beings, focussing on the
construction of characters and the role of the (linguistic, visual,
auditive or audio-visual) text. They frequently regard characters
themselves as sets of signifiers and textual structures.
4. Cognitive theories, which have been established since the 1980s, centre
on modelling in detail the cognitive and affective operations of
information processing. In these approaches, characters are regarded
as text-based constructs of the human mind, whose analysis requires
both models of understanding text and models of the human psyche.
The rivalry between these approaches in various disciplines and regions
has contributed to the fragmentation of character theory and the co-
existence of viewpoints. The interdisciplinary and international survey we
envisage with this volume may help to remedy the situation. Most
contributors to this book have done extensive research in the field, and
are thus able to present their own established approaches and theoretical
results. We are hoping that this will facilitate a dialogue between different
positions. The essays are roughly clustered into five groups: (1) general
topics (the research on characters, their ontology, and their relation to
6 Jens Eder / Fotis Jannidis / Ralf Schneider
_____________
3 Unfortunately, we did not succeed in including further important art forms and media
like painting or TV.
Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 7
_____________
10 See, e.g., Doležel: Heterocosmica,pp. 16–23; Ryan: Narrative, p. 91.
11 For a survey of philosophical positions on the ontology of possible worlds, see Melia:
Possible Worlds.
12 Branigan: Point of View, p. 12 (›surface feature of discourse‹); Wulff: Charakter, p. 1
[French ed.: 32]; see also Jannidis’ criticism of (post-) structuralist varieties of this
position (Figur, chap. 5).
13 For psychological approaches in literary theory, see Grabes: Personen; Schneider:
Grundriß; Culpeper: Characterization; Gerrig / Allbritton: Construction, and the
cricitism in Jannidis: Figur, pp. 177–184. No comparably detailed version of this
theory has been put forward in the area of film studies, but it is implied in many
approaches, such as Bordwell: Cognition; Ohler: Filmpsychologie; Grodal: Film
Genres, or Persson: Understanding Cinema.
14 See Thomasson: Fictional Characters, and Reicher: Metaphysik; see also Howell:
Fiction, and Lamarque: Fictional Entities.
15 Künne: Abstrakte Gegenstände, pp. 291–322; Currie: Characters; see also Proudfoot:
Fictional Entities; Howell: Fiction; Lamarque: Fictional Entities.
Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 9
_____________
18 Eder: Fiktionstheorie, pp. 55–59.
19 Margolin: Characters, p. 375.
Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 11
no opportunity to fill this gap in a way that would allow him to consider it
an item of reliable knowledge. We simply cannot know how many
children Lady Macbeth had, or if Sherlock Holmes has a birthmark on his
back – to mention two cases in point which have been discussed
extensively. There is, of course, nothing that would stop the recipient
from contributing such pieces of knowledge, and each individual reading,
viewing, etc. is likely to differ from all other readings with regard to the
unmentioned details the recipient imagines in the process, but on the level
of the fictional universe the text creates, the information will remain
unavailable.
Things get more complicated because the above formulation that ›the
medium which constitutes a character provides information‹ is admittedly
vague. In the most straightforward case, the colour of a character’s hair is
simply mentioned explicitly (in the language-based media genres) or
shown (in the visual media genres). The case is less clear if a text presents
this piece of information implicitly rather than explicitly (see below for a
further discussion of this distinction). A character may, for instance, be
presented as a typical Frisian, or a typical Italian from the south of Italy –
in both cases, information on the colour of the hair is implied. The
question here is to what extent the perception of persons feeds into – or
ought to feed into – the perception of characters. As has become clear,
knowledge that comes from outside the text plays a crucial role in many
cases when a character’s behaviour is to be understood adequately.
Therefore, if we want to understand the text, film, etc. in its historical
context, we need to find out about the psychological and anthropological
knowledge that was available to the author and her or his contemporaries.
This process, however, is quite different from the way we approach
persons, for in a historically adequate interpretation it only makes sense to
fill in information that would have been available in the context of the
text’s original production and reception. If we read, for instance, a
historical report about the symptoms of an unknown disease, we may of
course say that according to today’s knowledge, it is likely that this or that
particular disease is meant; in the case of a fictional text, this procedure
would be anachronistic and meaningless: If the disease is unknown in the
fictional world and its context, the lack of information cannot be
remedied. Whether or not one wants to admit such potentially anachronis-
tic readings depends to some degree on the theoretical background one
chooses: On the one hand, it has been an established practice, e.g. in
psychoanalytical interpretations, to find prove of the symptoms described
by psychoanalysis in texts that precede the development of the discipline
itself by a few hundred years (consider, for instance, Freud’s famous
analysis of the Oedipus myth in Shakespeare’s Hamlet); on the other hand,
Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 13
_____________
23 On accounts of social perception or social cognition, see for instance Zebrowitz:
Social Perception; Lavine / Borgida / Rudman: Social Cognition.
24 On the interaction between different kinds of social and media knowledge, see Ohler:
Filmpsychologie; Eder: Figur, pp. 162–248.
25 Titzmann: Psychoanalytisches Wissen, p. 184. Titzmann correctly points out that terms
like ›psychology‹ and ›anthropology‹ ought not to be taken literally, because neither
should we project the concepts formulated by the specialist disciplines back onto the
text and its context, nor should we overestimate the coherence of such bits of
knowledge.
Characters in Fictional Worlds: An Introduction 15
the knowledge about the actual world, including the habitus of social
groups. We will say more on such character types below.
In view of the abundance of knowledge about people and characters in
every society, it seems unlikely that there should still be gaps left in the
fictional world. Even information missing from the text could be filled in
from these knowledge stores. We should not forget, however, that
fictional worlds are not autonomous worlds; rather, they emerge from
processes of communication with their own particular rhetorical structure.
Some aspects of the presentation of characters may be part of aesthetic
structures that reach beyond the characters. Most importantly, characters
themselves can be signs in a number of ways: they can be instances of
exemplary behaviour, they can be symbols or in other ways representative
of feelings, attitudes, problems and the like. In addition to that, characters
are an important part of the emotional structure of literary texts, films, etc.
They influence the feelings, moods and emotions of the audience to a
considerable degree (see the remarks on ›Functions and Effects of
Characters‹ in this introduction). In accordance with the complexity of the
rhetorical structures, the reader or viewer may of course consider the
number of Lady Macbeth’s children. Many of the questions of this kind,
however, will look irrelevant, for the aesthetic structure sketched here will
determine the quality and quantity of the import of contemporary
knowledge.
The differences between characters and real persons come to the fore if
we systematically consider the ways we understand and talk about them.
Theories of reception stress the fact that we understand characters on
several levels:26 Viewers, readers, listeners or users do not only grasp a
character’s corporeality, mind, and sociality in the (fictional) world. They
are building on those processes to understand the character’s meanings as
sign or symbol, and to reflect on the character’s connections to its
creators, textual structures, ludic functions, etc. The latter processes
diverge from the social perception of real persons, and it would be
unusual (to say the least) to think about human beings in those ways.
Moreover, and in accordance with the different levels of reception, the
readers’ or viewers’ meta-fictional discourse about characters (e.g., talking
about them after leaving the cinema) contains sentences of different
logico-semantical structure:27 While the statement ›Holmes is a detective‹
stays safely in the boundaries of the fictional world and might also be
_____________
26 E.g., Persson: Understanding Cinema.
27 Künne: Abstrakte Gegenstände, pp. 295–296, and Currie: Characters, are proposing
different logical transcriptions of such sentences.