Current research on identification with narrative characters poses two problems. First, although identification is seen as a dynamic process of which the intensity varies during reading, it is usually measured by means of post-reading questionnaires containing self-report items. Second, it is not clear which linguistic characteristics evoke identification. The present paper proposes that an interdisciplinary framework allows for more precise manipulations and measurements of identification, which will ultimately advance our understanding of the antecedents and nature of this process. The central hypothesis of our Linguistic Cues Framework is that identification with a narrative character is a multidimensional experience for which different dimensions are evoked by different linguistic cues. The first part of the paper presents a literature review on identification, resulting in a renewed conceptualization of identification which distinguishes six dimensions: a spatiotemporal, a perceptual, a cognitive, a moral, an emotional, and an embodied dimension. The second part argues that each of these dimensions is influenced by specific linguistic cues which represent various aspects of the narrative character’s perspective. The proposed relations between linguistic cues and identification dimensions are specified in six propositions. The third part discusses what psychological and neurocognitive methods enable the measurement of the various identification dimensions in order to test the propositions. By establishing explicit connections between the linguistic characteristics of narratives and readers’ physical, psychological, and neurocognitive responses to narratives, this paper develops a research agenda for future empirical research on identification with narrative characters.

/pdf/evoking-and-measuring-identification-with-narrative-1aieaixl7d.pdf

Evoking and Measuring Identification with Narrative Characters - A Linguistic Cues Framework.

Character engagement and digital community practice: a multidisciplinary study of “Breaking Bad”

https://cyberleninka.org/article/n/143757.pdf

Uncharted features and dynamics of reading : voices, characters, and crossing of experiences.

Videogames are a hugely popular entertainment medium that plays host to hundreds of different ancient world representations. They provide very distinctive versions of recreated historical and mythological spaces, places, and peoples. The processes that go into their development, and the interactive procedures that accompany these games, must therefore be equally unique. This provides an impetus to both study the new ways in which ancient worlds are being reconfigured for gameplayers who actively work upon and alter them, and to revisit our conception of popular antiquity, a continuum within popular culture wherein ancient worlds are repeatedly received and changed in a variety of media contexts. This project begins by locating antiquity within a transmedial framework, permitting us to witness the free movement of representational strategies, themes, subtexts and ideas across media and into ancient world videogames. An original approach to the gameplay process, informed by cognitive and memory theory, characterises interaction with virtual antiquity as a procedure in which the receiver draws on preconceived notions and ideas of the ancient past to facilitate play. This notion of “ancient gameplay” as a reception process fed by general knowledges, previous pop-cultural engagements, and dim resonances of antiquity garnered from broad, informal past encounters allows for a wide, all-encompassing study of “ancient games”, the variety of sources they (and the player) draw upon, and the many experiences these games offer. The first chapter demonstrates the interrelationships between cinematic and televisual representations of antiquity and their action-based videogame counterparts, illustrating the ways in which branches of the onscreen tradition are borrowed and evolved in their new interactive forms. The next collective of ancient games locates “general” ancient materials in role-playing videogames, where familiar signifying materials are deployed to confront players with colonial spaces. The next chapter investigates the other side of ancient gameplay in foreign lands by investigating at how strategy games can become entrenched within a standardised visual vocabulary to provide one-sided, even troubling, impressions of classical empires represented in these gameworlds. The final chapter concretizes the transmedial, broadly cultural approach to ancient games and their play processes by presenting first-person videogames as multi-layered, multifaceted texts in which disparate, but specific, nodes of interpretative traditions surrounding ancient materials are drawn upon to immerse players in stylised, narrative-rich and thematically deep experiences. This study therefore has three primary motivations: to see how antiquity is represented and made functional in the interactive medium; to see how this affects player reception of these ancient games; and to build an interconnected “big picture” of antiquity in videogames within a wider media environment.

Ancient Greece and Rome in Videogames: Representation, Player Processes, and Transmedial Connections

Recent investigations into ethical experiences of fictional narratives have discussed the ‘positions’ that readers adopt in relation to the author, narrator and characters . This article applies Te...

Online readers between the camps: a Text World Theory analysis of ethical positioning in We Need to Talk About Kevin

In the analysis and interpretation of fictional minds, unnatural and cognitive
narratology may seem mutually exclusive. They each highlight different aspects of
what narrators and characters think and feel, and their explanatory grounds differ.
An unnatural reading unearths the narrative features, such as literal mind reading, that
cannot be reduced to real-world possibilities, whereas a cognitive approach may focus
on what is analogous to real-world cognition, or it may explain how unusual fiction is
made sense of in cognitive terms. This article offers a synthesis in which the contrast
between the two is closely examined. Then the article makes a case for a dialectical
approach in which readings move from one position to another in order to achieve a
more rewarding and encompassing understanding of fictional minds in general and
unnatural minds in particular. The argument is developed through a reading of Peter
Verhelst’s The Man I Became and through a discussion of the case of mind reading.

Fictional MindsComing to Terms with the Unnatural

This opening essay of the special issue on ‘Narration and Translation’ discusses the overlaps between the fields of narratology and translation studies. The fact that translation scholars have mere...

Narration and translation

De nieuwe kleren van keizerin Europa

This article discusses the construction of fictional minds in audio drama. Drawing upon social semiotics, cognitive narratology, and the narratology of audio drama, it starts from the premise that ...

Lars Bernaerts

Papers

Fictional MindsComing to Terms with the Unnatural

Narration and translation

De nieuwe kleren van keizerin Europa

The multimodal evocation of minds in audio drama

Hybride en multimodaal : nieuwe genretheorie en het literaire hoorspel vandaag