Grasping Represented Beings: Forming Mental Models of Characters (T)

Part III of the book (Chapters 5 and 6) deals with characters as represented beings in a storyworld. The characteristics of these beings can be organised into four main areas: physical, mental, social, and behavioural. These properties are intertwined and refer to each other in processes of character reception. Recipients construct mental models of characters on the basis of textual information in conjunction with their own mental dispositions. Mental character models are dynamic, multimodal mental representations that supplement perceptions with various types of knowledge and imagination and can be more or less typified or personalised. Comparable to social cognition in real-life interactions, recipients use the person schema, cultural ideas of human nature, common social categories, and folk psychology (including stereotypes and biases) to understand characters, their inner lives, and their behaviour. However, the reception of characters also differs significantly from social perception of real persons, due to media-specific factors: Unlike real persons, characters are also perceived as artefacts, symbols, and symptoms. Recipients are aware of the communicative functions and fictionality of characters and use various types of media-specific knowledge (e.g. about stars or narrative conventions) to understand them. Moreover, the traits of characters often differ from those of real people in order to achieve certain narrative effects (e.g. in fantasy, surrealism, or postmodern deconstruction). The chapter shows how all this contributes to the complexity of character reception and shapes different types of characters and audience reactions.