Scholars from various fields have argued that readers of fiction often evaluate and interpret texts according to real-life values and expectations. At its strongest, research argues that readers seek to identify with characters, feeling characters’ emotions and engaging with them intellectually. In this section work from psychology of reading, cognitive poetics, and
cognitive narratology focusing on the prominence of mimetic reading is considered.
For some working in the psychology of reading field, literature is powerful and unique as an art-form because of its capacity to create fictional worlds that readers can relate to their own and characters with whom they can empathise. Research from psychology of reading has found that readers have the ability to ‘participate’ and ‘immerse’ themselves in literary texts (Gerrig, 1993; Gerrig and Allbritton, 1990), and some of these studies have argued that, as a default position, readers treat characters and narrative events as replicating the people and the events experienced in everyday life (e.g. Gerrig, 1993). Readers often cross the boundaries between the real-world and the world of the text, and this is most evident in the ‘participatory responses’ that readers direct towards texts (Gerrig, 1993). Such responses include reader thoughts or verbalisations such as ‘watch out!’ when a character is in danger, or ‘I’m glad that character is happy’ following a plot resolution (1993: 65-96). The addresses to character discussed in the previous chapter are particularly good examples of participatory responses. Gerrig suggests that readers often interpret the fictional textual worlds as mimetic of real life, unless the text actively discourages this kind of response (1993: 69) and that readers’
memories and experiences are impossible to divorce from their reading because texts ‘call forth from memory real-world events and causal possibilities’ (1993: 231).
Studies in this area using reading autobiographies have similarly found links between real-life experiences, memories and literary fiction (Andringa, 2004). When reporting on their reading history, readers frequently cited identification with characters as an important part of reading enjoyment (Andringa 2004: 211). In particular, readers reported experiencing ‘similarity identification’, seeing similarities between themselves and a character, and deriving pleasure from this (Andringa 2004: 226; see also Rall and Harris [2000] and Stockwell [2005, 2009]).
Other work in this area has considered reading as a form of simulation (Oatley 1999, 2002, 2003). As discussed in the previous chapter in relation to reported discourse, this idea of reading as simulation presupposes that readers have a tendency to treat fictional worlds as comparable, and sometimes based on, phenomena in the real world. Oatley argues for similarities between computer simulations and the reading process:
A play or novel runs on the minds of the audience or reader as a computer simulation runs on a computer. Just as computer simulation has augmented theories of language, perception, problem solving, and connectionist learning, so fiction as simulation illuminates the problem of human action and emotions. (Oatley 1999: 105-106)
Oatley (1999) focuses on readers’ emotional involvement in narratives, discerning three psychological processes that lead to readers experiencing strong emotions when reading fiction: identification, sympathy, and autobiographical memory (1999: 113-114). The process of autobiographical memory is most relevant to the data presented in this chapter. Building on research into how theatre audiences experience emotion (Scheff, 1979), Oatley (1999: 113-114) argues that reading fiction helps us cope with events in our everyday lives that are difficult to understand. He states that when we read of a character’s problems, for instance, we run a simulation of this character’s predicament, experiencing a version of these emotions as prompted by the text. A reader’s feeling of emotion towards a character’s predicament will be stronger if the reader has experienced a similar situation to that of the character. There is
not an impermeable divide between reading fiction and experiencing reality, and the ways in which readers experience the contents of literary texts are based on the same psychological processes that are run when they experience ‘real’ emotions and events (Oatley, 1999). Readers’ autobiographical memories can be primed by events in the text, and their simulations of the fictional emotions can feedback to their real lives, allowing them to re- evaluate their own, similar experiences (for a similar view on the importance of personal memory in the reading process see Mar [2004]).
Like Gerrig (1993) and Oatley (1999), Zunshine’s work (2006) posits that the act of reading fiction provides ‘grist for the mills’ of our mind-reading capabilities, even though ‘on some level we do remember that literary characters are not real people at all’ (2006: 16-17). Zunshine surmises that our default state when reading is to treat characters and events as based (in some way) on reality, judging them according to real-life expectations. Reading fiction allows us to ‘try-on’ other mental states and identities, which in Zunshine’s view helps us to cope with comparable events that may occur to us in the real-world (2006: 17).
The above overview is just a sketch of studies that consider the influence that real life reader identities, experiences and emotions have on the reading process; for other research in this area, see: cognitive poetics (e.g. Gavins, 2007; Stockwell, 2005, 2009; Whiteley, 2011), literary pragmatics (e.g. MacMahon 2009a, 2009b) and narratology (e.g. Palmer, 2002, 2004). The research discussed here suggests that the divide between the real world and fictional worlds is not impermeable, and that readers frequently (and perhaps necessarily) move between the two. The emphasis that the readers place in their talk on mimetic reading, or reading for real life, suggests that simulation (Oatley, 1999), participation (Gerrig, 1993), and identification (Andringa, 2004) are at work during the reading process. At the very least,
these terms are useful in accounting for the ways in which readers talk about texts, even if directly linking these to underlying psychological processes is problematic.
In the following subsection five examples of mimetic reading from the groups are presented and analysed. These examples not only show the prevalence of mimetic reading , but also the ways in which readers orient to this form of reading across multiple turns at talk.