"Where She Comes From": Mindreading in Levring's The King is Alive

Helms enters the debate about the usefulness of character criticism, joining critics such as Michael Bristol, Jessica Slights, and Paul Yachnin in arguing for a criticism that considers characters as if they were real people living in recognizable worlds. Mindreading is the human ability to look at a person or a literary character and contemplate what that person is thinking, feeling, and planning. Drawing particularly on the work of Simon Baron-Cohen and Alvin Goldman, Helms reviews contemporary cognitive science and the philosophy of mind to identify two methods of mindreading: inference (the theory-theory of mindreading) and imagination (the simulation theory of mindreading). Helms adds to this conversation by applying cognitive science to discussions of character in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece.

Reading the Mind: Cognitive Science and Close Reading

To essay the mind:shakespearean character and theories of mindreading

Through Levring and Jensen’s The King Is Alive and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Helms discuss two ways to integrate inference and imagination. The King Is Alive—an appropriation of King Lear—exemplifies a story where inference frames strongly imaginative character building. Twelfth Night illustrates how inference and imagination might be integrated through Mark Johnson’s theory of conceptual blending: in the case of Duke Orsino, inference and imagination can blend together to produce ambiguity and surprise. A reading of Orsino could be wholly imaginative (focusing on his melancholy) or wholly inferential (focusing on his social role and authority as Duke). When Orsino threatens to kill Cesario in the final act, these two interpretations suddenly combine into one via conceptual blending, the combination of discrete inputs into a coherent, gestalt-like whole.

Integrating Minds: Blending Methods in The King Is Alive and Twelfth Night

Beyond character : a post/humanist approach to modern theatre

This paper is about the metaphysics of fiction. It outlines a case for the existence of “fictional characters,” more precisely, fictive characters encountered in narrative fictions. In doing so, it tries to secure a niche for such entities within the familiar world of material objects, artefacts, and properties. Thus I advocate realism about fictive characters. “Realism” here denotes an ontological thesis. To be a realist about something is to believe it exists and is what it is independently of how one takes it to be. Realism, then, is associated with mind-independence. Macbeth and company may strike us as poor candidates for realism. But let’s not be hasty.

Trevor Ponech

Papers

The Reality of Fictive Cinematic Characters