Literary Character

4 Key excerpts on "Literary Character"

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  Handbook of Narratology

  • Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert, Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Character Fotis Jannidis 1 Definition Character is a text- or media-based figure in a storyworld, usually hu-man or human-like. 2 Explication The term “character” is used to refer to participants in storyworlds cre-ated by various media (→ narration in various media) in contrast to “persons” as individuals in the real world. The status of characters is a matter of long-standing debate: can characters be treated solely as an effect created by recurrent elements in the discourse (Weinsheimer 1979), or are they to be seen as entities created by words but distin-guishable from them and calling for knowledge about human beings (cf. 3.1)? Answering the latter question involves determining what kinds of knowledge are required, but also to what extent such knowl-edge is employed in understanding characters. Three forms of knowl-edge in particular are relevant for the narratological analysis of charac-ter: (a) the basic type, which provides a very fundamental structure for those entities which are seen as sentient beings; (b) character models or types such as the femme fatale or the hard-boiled detective ; (c) ency-clopedic knowledge of human beings underlying inferences which con-tribute to the process of characterization, i.e. a store of information ranging from everyday knowledge to genre-specific competence. Most theoretical approaches to character seek to circumscribe reliance on real-world knowledge in some way and treat characters as entities in a storyworld subject to specific rules (cf. 3.2). One important line of thought in the anti-realistic treatment of character is the functional view. In this perspec-tive, first established by Aristotle, characters are subordinate to or determined by the narrative action; in the 20 th cen-tury, there have been attempts to describe characters in terms of a deep structure based on their roles in the plot common to all narratives (cf. 3.3).

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  Weighing Hearts

  Character, Judgment, and the Ethics of Reading the Bible

  • Stuart Lasine(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • T&T Clark

    (Publisher)

  Character and character evaluation are of increasing interest to scholars in various branches of psychology, 6 literary studies and moral philosophy. Within literary studies, characterization has long been considered “the bête noire of narratology” (Woloch 2003, 14). For many years, a good number of inuential literary theorists have argued that the concept of a coherent character or self is obsolescent, illusory, or a perni-cious tool of ideology, whether we are speaking about “characters” in ction or the character of “real people.” 7 Woloch notes that the tendency 5. Worman cites Gill’s view that in the classical period the term arose “from traditional notions of types of people, denoting ‘character-markers’ such as a per-son’s speeches that indicate moral stances, signicant actions, and type-revealing statements made by others” (Worman 2003, 32; cf. Gill, 1990, 6–7). 6. This includes moral psychology. According to Doris (2002, 3), “moral psy-chology is the study of motivational, affective, and cognitive capacities manifested in moral contexts;…[it] investigates the psychological properties of moral agents.” Doris’s attempt to incorporate the ndings of empirical psychologists in his discus-sions of virtue ethics has raised the ire of some academic philosophers; see n. 15 below. 7. Many kinds of critics have joined in what Hochman (1985, 14) calls this “ritual of cannibalization.” In the 1970s, Barthes (1974, 95) proclaimed that “what is obsolescent in today’s novel is…the character,” and Cixous (1974, 385) argued that “the ideology underlying this fetishization of ‘character’ is that of ‘I’ who is a whole subject.” More recently, Belsey called “classic realism” the “accomplice of ideol-ogy,” in part because “it tends to offer…the assumption that character, unied and coherent, is the source of action” (2002, 67; cf. 44–48).

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  Narrative Form

  • S. Keen(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Making room for reading against the grain, historically contextualized reading, and reading that acknowledges the openendedness of interpretation requires a more flexible interpretation of character, including characters as entities which readers understand as related to people, or what Baruch Hochman calls ‘substantial hypothetical beings’ (Character in Literature, 26). This approach to an imaginatively fleshed out fictional world and its inhabitants leads to a different kind of insight than the equally useful attention to the small textual building blocks that are put in place, in a fixed order, by the writer who creates both character and plot out of words. The questions that students of narrative ask about character thus range widely. They may address the fictive personality of the character: Why is Mr Woodhouse, Emma’s father, so stingy? They may react to generic expec- tations: Does Thomas Hardy succeed in making Henchard a tragic hero? They may focus on external details: How does Dorothea Brooke’s clothing reveal her attitudes and ideals? They may draw attention to representations of characters’ embodiment: How do these details shape the characters’ thoughts and actions and plot trajectories? They may emphasize 56 Narrative Form

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  Deleuze and American Literature

  Affect and Virtuality in Faulkner, Wharton, Ellison, and McCarthy

  • A. Bourassa(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R O N E Literature, Character, and the Human In literature the human reveals itself through language. Or rather, in literature, language creates the human. Literature is the intersection of language and the human. The human, which has its possibility in language, extracts from the possibilities of language to create literature. Literature extracts the human from language to give the human its own voice. The subtraction of literature from language, leaves us with all that is nonhuman. Language, literature and the human fight pitched battles of mutual capture, shifting alliances and attrition, punctuated by periods of peace or uneasy truce. Nowhere does the human seem more the cornerstone of literature than in the novel. If the novel is an escape, it is an escape into: mean- ing, sense, the human. Madame Bovary. Isabel Archer. Gatsby. Ahab. Hester Prynne. It is the great characters of the novel that we remember, and the emotions that spring from the human’s encounter with all that is outside of it. Greed, obsession, sin, regret, and pride assign a value to the humanity of fictional characters. Their triumphs are the human triumphs of understanding, reconciliation, creation; their defeats are equally human: despair, loneliness, loss. The novel, and criticism of the novel, stakes a claim to a definition of the human. But then again, who doesn’t make such a claim? The human may be a political designation, as in the Roman homo humanus Deleuze and American Literature 2 as opposed to homo barbarus, designating as human that which belongs to a certain group, a certain nation. “We are human; all others are something else.” The definition of the human may as easily be a sec- ular as a religious term. Man may be central in being the premiere creation of God, or his centrality may be an offshoot of the death of God. We may even leave the realm of the humanities and of the lit- erary altogether.

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