Chapter 4 - Perspective Taking and Literature

Summary

In Chapter 4, we examine how perspective taking has been conceptualized in literary studies and elements of writing style affect perspective taking by the reader. We begin with an analysis of concepts commonly associated with perspective taking, including identification and transportation. In our analysis of the effect of the text on perspective taking, we distinguish two classes of features: First-order features are those that have often been assumed to produce perspective taking, such as the use of personal pronouns, providing mental access to a character, and the use of free-indirect speech. We conclude that there is little clear evidence for a simple causal relation between such features and perspective taking by the reader. Second-order features are those that, we argue, lead to elaborative processing by the reader and thus lay the foundation for perspective-taking analogies. Such features include showing versus telling styles, textual gaps, embodied descriptions, and foregrounding. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the role of the narrator and the relation between the reader and the character.