the present study has a cognitive approach to empathy and character engagement in cinema. in discussing how through empathy and engagement with real and fictional characters, we extend our minds and enhance our cognitive abilities, the present paper studies bahram tavakkoli’s wandering in the fog (2010), to show how andy clark and david chalmers’s idea of the extended mind as joined with murray...

J.M. Coetzee is directly or indirectly always concerned with the multi-layered narrative texts problematising concept of authorship and narration. This study treats two novels as “textual narratives” “narrative dramas” at a time. From postclassical narratological perspective, investigates narrators levels in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003) authors without authority. The characters nov...

It seems it is especially postmodern literature that undermines the belief in a clear and direct relationship between the physical world and the language depicting it. Quite recently, especially the possible worlds theories and their application in literary theory have tried to explain this relationship. Analyzing the narrative techniques used by Donald Barthelme in his short story The Dragon, ...

Conversational participants tend to immediately and unconsciously adapt to each other’s language styles: a speaker will even adjust the number of articles and other function words in their next utterance in response to the number in their partner’s immediately preceding utterance. This striking level of coordination is thought to have arisen as a way to achieve social goals, such as gaining app...

The importance of literary travel writing can be partly explained by the qualities it shares with imaginative literature featuring the concepts of Romanticism. Writers from Twain and Steinbeck to Thoreau and Wordsworth have depicted the human bent towards adventure and the unknown and, especially in rapidly developing societies, the urge to return to simplicity and the core values of life and t...

Have you ever felt like you got to know a character in a story, or felt like you could imagine the world she lived in? Have you ever wondered why the books we read seem to come to life in our minds? Studies from laboratories around the world are beginning to unravel this mystery. These studies show that when we read stories, our minds actually act like they are participating in the events in th...

Readers often describe vivid experiences of voices and characters in a manner that has been likened to hallucination. Little is known, however, of how common such experiences are, nor the individual differences they may reflect. Here we present the results of a 2014 survey conducted in collaboration with a national UK newspaper and an international book festival. Participants (n=1566) completed...