Abstract Within the field of narrative empathy studies, the concept of “negative empathy,” meaning a sharing of emotions with morally negative characters, has become increasingly discussed. Through the examination of The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith, this article contributes new insights into narratological and stylistic devices eliciting readers’ empathy. This study analyses responses from expert and non-expert readers to understand how they conceptualise empathy and qualify their engagement with the novel’s eponymous character. I argue that the novel’s figural narration, which involves extensive displays of the character’s mind and silencing the narrator’s moral guidance, invites empathy. Finally, I suggest that Highsmith manipulates her readers through three related stylistic techniques (free indirect discourse, stylistic contagion and equivocal sentences), which blur the lines between the third-person narration and the character’s inner discourse. By insidiously presenting the hero’s behaviour as sensible and justified, Highsmith persuades readers to become not only witnesses but accomplices to Ripley’s crimes.
{"title":"From witness to accomplice: the manipulation of readers’ empathy through consciousness representation in Patricia Highsmith’s <i>The Talented Mr Ripley</i>","authors":"Juliette Bourget","doi":"10.1515/jls-2023-2010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2023-2010","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Within the field of narrative empathy studies, the concept of “negative empathy,” meaning a sharing of emotions with morally negative characters, has become increasingly discussed. Through the examination of The Talented Mr Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith, this article contributes new insights into narratological and stylistic devices eliciting readers’ empathy. This study analyses responses from expert and non-expert readers to understand how they conceptualise empathy and qualify their engagement with the novel’s eponymous character. I argue that the novel’s figural narration, which involves extensive displays of the character’s mind and silencing the narrator’s moral guidance, invites empathy. Finally, I suggest that Highsmith manipulates her readers through three related stylistic techniques (free indirect discourse, stylistic contagion and equivocal sentences), which blur the lines between the third-person narration and the character’s inner discourse. By insidiously presenting the hero’s behaviour as sensible and justified, Highsmith persuades readers to become not only witnesses but accomplices to Ripley’s crimes.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134976524","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This paper examines the effects of emotional language and telecinematic direct address in the BBC television series Fleabag (2016–2019) on viewers’ empathetic engagement, showing how multimodal narratives can invite empathy. In this series, direct address, often used to create intimacy with the audience, is the vehicle through which the eponymous protagonist shares or does not share her emotional states with those within or outside the diegesis. This way of communicating her feelings, I argue, shapes and intensifies viewers’ potential empathetic engagement in different ways throughout the series. In particular, I explain that the way in which Fleabag recurrently uses expressive language, most prominently swear words, while addressing the audience, initially invites viewer’s empathy in Season 1, before a stylistic shift in Season 2 eventually redefines this kind of emotional address: at the end of the series, viewers’ empathy is disinvited, positioning them as unwanted voyeurs.
{"title":"<i>I fucking love you</i>! Emotional address in <i>Fleabag</i>, or how viewers’ empathy becomes voyeurism","authors":"Julie Neveux","doi":"10.1515/jls-2023-2013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2023-2013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper examines the effects of emotional language and telecinematic direct address in the BBC television series Fleabag (2016–2019) on viewers’ empathetic engagement, showing how multimodal narratives can invite empathy. In this series, direct address, often used to create intimacy with the audience, is the vehicle through which the eponymous protagonist shares or does not share her emotional states with those within or outside the diegesis. This way of communicating her feelings, I argue, shapes and intensifies viewers’ potential empathetic engagement in different ways throughout the series. In particular, I explain that the way in which Fleabag recurrently uses expressive language, most prominently swear words, while addressing the audience, initially invites viewer’s empathy in Season 1, before a stylistic shift in Season 2 eventually redefines this kind of emotional address: at the end of the series, viewers’ empathy is disinvited, positioning them as unwanted voyeurs.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134976519","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract One way in which character emotion is communicated in texts is through pathetic fallacy (PF), a figure of speech that projects emotions onto surroundings, which can be conceptualised in terms of variations on the conceptual metaphor emotion is surroundings. This article explores the empathetic affordances of this emotion metaphor, presenting evidence for the ways readers exploit the linguistic forms of PF in Alice Walker’s short story The Flowers to empathise with its protagonist. We draw on think-aloud data and post-reading reflections to analyse evidence of PF perception and empathy, using Pager-McClymont’s protocol for analysing PF perception and Fernandez-Quintanilla’s framework for analysing self-report of empathy. Findings show that (1) PF’s implicit communication of emotions affords empathy even when readers do not recognise the narrative technique, and that (2) specific PF instantiations afford empathy depending on underlying conceptual metaphor, textual context and correspondence with readers’ experiential background.
{"title":"The role of pathetic fallacy in shaping narrative empathy","authors":"Fransina Stradling, Kimberley Pager-McClymont","doi":"10.1515/jls-2023-2009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2023-2009","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract One way in which character emotion is communicated in texts is through pathetic fallacy (PF), a figure of speech that projects emotions onto surroundings, which can be conceptualised in terms of variations on the conceptual metaphor emotion is surroundings. This article explores the empathetic affordances of this emotion metaphor, presenting evidence for the ways readers exploit the linguistic forms of PF in Alice Walker’s short story The Flowers to empathise with its protagonist. We draw on think-aloud data and post-reading reflections to analyse evidence of PF perception and empathy, using Pager-McClymont’s protocol for analysing PF perception and Fernandez-Quintanilla’s framework for analysing self-report of empathy. Findings show that (1) PF’s implicit communication of emotions affords empathy even when readers do not recognise the narrative technique, and that (2) specific PF instantiations afford empathy depending on underlying conceptual metaphor, textual context and correspondence with readers’ experiential background.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134976525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-10-01DOI: 10.1515/jls-2023-frontmatter2
{"title":"Frontmatter","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/jls-2023-frontmatter2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2023-frontmatter2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134977467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Foreword – Obituary: Terry Eaton","authors":"Marina Lambrou","doi":"10.1515/jls-2023-2001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2023-2001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43571073","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract (Sophie Hannah’s. 2009. The Other Half Lives. London: Hodder). The Other Half Lives both complies with, and departs from, the crime fiction formula or text schema. It features a mystery the specifics of which are unravelled non-chronologically, while its numerous crimes and non-ideal criminals and victims disrupt readers’ world schemas and help enable its surprising effects. Not unlike such fiction, the story’s early happenings feature late in the telling, while many happenings are given from different character perspectives. Both of these help unsettle narrative perspective, and generate suspense, mystery, and readers’ later repairing and replacing of frames. Focalisation and the working and reworking of killing characters’ early depiction are techniques also enabling foreshadowing and misdirection, for readers’ sympathies and prejudices to be manipulated accordingly, and for surprise revelations to prove effective, even when a surprise ending is – given the nature of this genre – only to be expected.
{"title":"Plotting and characterisation in Sophie Hannah’s The Other Half Lives: a cognitive stylistic approach","authors":"C. Gregoriou","doi":"10.1515/jls-2023-2004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2023-2004","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract (Sophie Hannah’s. 2009. The Other Half Lives. London: Hodder). The Other Half Lives both complies with, and departs from, the crime fiction formula or text schema. It features a mystery the specifics of which are unravelled non-chronologically, while its numerous crimes and non-ideal criminals and victims disrupt readers’ world schemas and help enable its surprising effects. Not unlike such fiction, the story’s early happenings feature late in the telling, while many happenings are given from different character perspectives. Both of these help unsettle narrative perspective, and generate suspense, mystery, and readers’ later repairing and replacing of frames. Focalisation and the working and reworking of killing characters’ early depiction are techniques also enabling foreshadowing and misdirection, for readers’ sympathies and prejudices to be manipulated accordingly, and for surprise revelations to prove effective, even when a surprise ending is – given the nature of this genre – only to be expected.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46456930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jessica Norledge: The Language of Dystopia","authors":"Naomi Adam","doi":"10.1515/jls-2023-2007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2023-2007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48674730","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract Previous research has identified a type of nonstandard simile in which the ground is a non-salient feature of the source term (for example, the nonstandard hard as a lamp as opposed to the standard hard as a rock), and found this type to be common in poetry and much rarer in non-poetic discourse. Since these nonstandard similes entail a fundamental semantic breach and violation of a basic convention of the simile, how can their existence be explained? Here we claim that it is the poetic context itself, the poem within which these similes appear, which is the key to explaining their existence and their unique advantage. Through a series of poetic examples, including poems by Plath, Lee, and Rukeyser, we show how the semantic difficulty of the nonstandard simile serves the poem and fulfils various functions within it.
{"title":"“Insistent as anesthetic”: difficult similes subserving the poetic context","authors":"Roi Tartakovsky, Yeshayahu Shen","doi":"10.1515/jls-2023-2003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2023-2003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Previous research has identified a type of nonstandard simile in which the ground is a non-salient feature of the source term (for example, the nonstandard hard as a lamp as opposed to the standard hard as a rock), and found this type to be common in poetry and much rarer in non-poetic discourse. Since these nonstandard similes entail a fundamental semantic breach and violation of a basic convention of the simile, how can their existence be explained? Here we claim that it is the poetic context itself, the poem within which these similes appear, which is the key to explaining their existence and their unique advantage. Through a series of poetic examples, including poems by Plath, Lee, and Rukeyser, we show how the semantic difficulty of the nonstandard simile serves the poem and fulfils various functions within it.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46783231","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-03-29DOI: 10.1515/jls-2023-frontmatter1
{"title":"Frontmatter","authors":"","doi":"10.1515/jls-2023-frontmatter1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2023-frontmatter1","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135526482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract This article offers a cognitive-poetic analysis of Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “Oh, Madam . . .” (1941), a war-time story set in a London house partly damaged during the Blitz. This literary text includes numerous gaps in the form of ellipsis, dashes, and unfinished sentences, inviting the reader into filling them as a part of reading experience. The analysis critically applies Peter Stockwell’s (Stockwell, Peter. 2012 [2009]. Texture: A cognitive aesthetics of reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Stockwell, Peter. 2020. Cognitive poetics: An introduction, 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge) concepts of texture, resonance, and textual attractors. We stress the importance of identifying textual attractors in accounting for the dynamicity of the meaning-construction process in Bowen’s story. Arguably, the so-called resonance effect, a part of the reader’s aesthetic experience, results from their cognitive engagement during the process of gap-filling. In addition to that, the recognition of specific attractors enables the reader to grasp the social relations encoded in the text. To explain the cognitive processes involved in the reading of “Oh, Madam . . .”, we propose to expand Stockwell’s list of “features of good textual attractors” by including two additional ones: absence and repetition.
{"title":"Textual attractors in literary discourse: a cognitive-poetic reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s “Oh, Madam . . .”","authors":"Anna Kędra-Kardela, A. Kowalczyk","doi":"10.1515/jls-2023-2005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2023-2005","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article offers a cognitive-poetic analysis of Elizabeth Bowen’s short story “Oh, Madam . . .” (1941), a war-time story set in a London house partly damaged during the Blitz. This literary text includes numerous gaps in the form of ellipsis, dashes, and unfinished sentences, inviting the reader into filling them as a part of reading experience. The analysis critically applies Peter Stockwell’s (Stockwell, Peter. 2012 [2009]. Texture: A cognitive aesthetics of reading. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Stockwell, Peter. 2020. Cognitive poetics: An introduction, 2nd edn. London and New York: Routledge) concepts of texture, resonance, and textual attractors. We stress the importance of identifying textual attractors in accounting for the dynamicity of the meaning-construction process in Bowen’s story. Arguably, the so-called resonance effect, a part of the reader’s aesthetic experience, results from their cognitive engagement during the process of gap-filling. In addition to that, the recognition of specific attractors enables the reader to grasp the social relations encoded in the text. To explain the cognitive processes involved in the reading of “Oh, Madam . . .”, we propose to expand Stockwell’s list of “features of good textual attractors” by including two additional ones: absence and repetition.","PeriodicalId":42874,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF LITERARY SEMANTICS","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43121467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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