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Literatur als emotionale Attrappe : eine evolutionspsychologische Lösung des "paradox of fiction"
(2006)
Ausgehend von der Beobachtung, dass die emotionale Reaktion auf fiktionale Stimuli einigen alltagspsychologischen Vorannahmen widerspricht, wird ein psychologisches Emotionsmodell entwickelt, das Theorieangebote der Verhaltensforschung und der biologischen Evolutionstheorie aufgreift und erklären kann, warum wir überhaupt Emotionen in Bezug auf Literatur erleben. Emotionale Wirkungen von Literatur werden dabei heuristisch gleichgesetzt mit der Wirkung von Attrappen. Anschließend wird die Primärunterscheidung realer und fiktionaler Stimuli an Hand typisierter Beispiele aufgelöst zugunsten einer emotionsspezifischen Betrachtungsweise, die nach der jeweiligen emotionalen Qualität bestimmter Textstimuli fragt und aus ihr eine entwicklungsgeschichtlich plausible, adaptive Verlaufswahrscheinlichkeit des jeweiligen Emotionsprogramms ableitet.
In folk theories of art reception, readers and cinema audiences are said to experience fictional worlds vicariously 'through' characters, i.e. they 'identify' themselves with them, they partake in their experiences 'empathetically'. In the first section of my essay, I will argue that it is not character but focalization (point of view) which, on a fundamental level, guides our fictional experience, and I will exemplify several ways that characters (or similar ideas) can then in addition come into play. In the next two sections, I will discuss possible cognitive correlates of both the textual device of focalization and textual clues indicating ›persons‹. The aim is to show that what I call ›psycho-poetic effects‹ (that is, the mental representation of anthropomorphic instances) are best described as byproducts of various cognitive programs involved in the reception of narrative fiction. 'Empathy', as it is understood in the above mentioned folk theory of art reception, can then be analysed into individual algorithms of social cognition. And it can be differentiated, as is done in the last section, from other phenomena often confused with it, like emotional experience proper and emotional contagion. Also, I refer to the idea that mirror neurons provide the means to empathize with others, literary characters included. My general proposition is to revise and refine those concepts with the help of evolutionary theory and, thus, to hypothesize as cognitive correlates for textual features only programs specific enough to be correlated with a specific adaptive function which they may have performed in the process of human evolution.