Abstract
Literary theories of transportation and empathy foreground the reader’s experience of the fictional world that he or she constructs, or reconstructs, during the act of reading. Explicitly or implicitly, such theories understand that world as being rich in sensual impressions and having a strong impact on the reader. The fictional world is thought to possess the capacity to affect the reader’s beliefs and to invite participation by the reader and empathetic feelings vis-à-vis the fictional characters.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Cf. Ray Paul and David Balmer, Simulation Modelling (Bromley: Chartwell Bratt; Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1993), pp. 1–3.
See also, e.g., John Vince, Virtual Reality Systems (Wokingham etc.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), pp. 338–41
(flight simulation) and Kendal McGuffie and Ann Henderson-Sellers, A Climate Modelling Primer, 3rd edn (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2005) (climate modelling). Alvin I. Goldman suggests succinct definitions of key varieties of simulation in his Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 2006), esp. pp. 37–38.
Keith Oatley, Best Laid Schemes: The Psychology of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1992), p. 125.
Susan L. Feagin, Reading with Feeling: The Aesthetics of Appreciation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), chapter 4 (quotation from p. 112).
See also the substantially identical account in Susan L. Feagin, “Empathizing as Simulating”, in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 149–61, at pp. 150–51: “a necessary condition for empathizing with a character in a literary work is that one simulates the relevant mental processes of that character, and for one process to simulate another it is necessary for it to be structurally similar, in relevant respects, to the process simulated”.
See, e.g., Joe Cruz and Robert M. Gordon, “Simulation Theory”, in Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, ed.-in-chief Lynn Nadel, vol. 4 (London, New York, and Tokyo: Nature Publishing Group, 2003), pp. 9–14. My description of the two theories in the text is highly simplified. It is also worth pointing out that one can combine the two theories to a considerable extent, as Goldman does in his Simulating Minds.
Gregory Currie, Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 144.
Keith Oatley, “Emotions and the Story Worlds of Fiction”, in Narrative Impact: Social and Cognitive Foundations, ed. Melanie C. Green, Jeffrey J. Strange, and Timothy C. Brock (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), pp. 29–69, at p. 61.
Erich Schæn, “Veränderungen der literarischen Rezeptionskompetenz Jugendlicher im aktuellen Medienverbund”, in Moderne Formen des Erzählens in der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Gegenwart unter literarischen und didaktischen Aspekten, ed. Günter Lange and Wilhelm Steffens (Würzburg: Kænigshausen und Neumann, 1995), pp. 99–127; here, p. 108.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2012 Anders Pettersson
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pettersson, A. (2012). Simulation and Identification. In: The Concept of Literary Application. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137035424_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44225-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-03542-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)