John Foxwell j.m.r.foxwell@durham.ac.uk
PGR Student Doctor of Philosophy
‘I’ve learned I need to treat my characters like people’: Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices
Foxwell, John; Alderson-Day, Ben; Fernyhough, Charles; Woods, Angela
Authors
Dr Benjamin Alderson-Day benjamin.alderson-day@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Professor Charles Fernyhough c.p.fernyhough@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Professor Angela Woods angela.woods@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Abstract
Writers often report vivid experiences of hearing characters talking to them, talking back to them, and exhibiting independence and autonomy. However, systematic empirical studies of this phenomenon are almost non-existent, and as a result little is known about its cause, extent, or phenomenology. Here we present the results of a survey of professional writers (n = 181) run in collaboration with the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Participants provided detailed descriptions of their experiences of their characters in response to a phenomenological questionnaire, and also reported on imaginary companions, inner speech and hallucination-proneness. Qualitative analysis indicated that the phenomenology of the experience of agentive characters varied in terms of the characters’ separateness from the writer’s self and the kinds of interaction this did or did not allow for. We argue that these variations can be understood in relation to accounts of mindreading and agency tracking which adopt intuitive as opposed to inferential models.
Citation
Foxwell, J., Alderson-Day, B., Fernyhough, C., & Woods, A. (2020). ‘I’ve learned I need to treat my characters like people’: Varieties of agency and interaction in Writers’ experiences of their Characters’ Voices. Consciousness and Cognition, 79, Article 102901. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102901
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Feb 12, 2020 |
Online Publication Date | Feb 26, 2020 |
Publication Date | Mar 31, 2020 |
Deposit Date | Mar 11, 2020 |
Publicly Available Date | Mar 11, 2020 |
Journal | Consciousness and Cognition |
Print ISSN | 1053-8100 |
Publisher | Elsevier |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 79 |
Article Number | 102901 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.102901 |
Public URL | https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1306226 |
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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
© 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4.0/).
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