Introspection of Characters in Fiction: Cultural Aspect

DOI

10.2991/icadce-18.2018.20How to use a DOI?

Keywords

narratology; text category; introspection; inner reality of characters; fictional reality; virtual reality; functions of introspection; language markers; conceptual metaphor

Abstract

The paper presents introspection as self-examination by a fiction personage of his / her inner emotional, mental or physical state. With the help of introspection the reader can perceive the fictional world through the character’s mind and senses, which helps to better decode the writer’s message. Introspection should be distinguished from other categories used to describe the inner reality of a fiction character: character’s flashbacks and flashforwards, presentation of the character’s internal point of view, or the imitation of the character’s stream of consciousness. Being part of virtual reality in fiction, introspection is a narrower notion, which embraces only the inner world of the character. The functions of introspection and the language markers that help to recognize introspection in the text are discussed. It is shown that apart from some obvious introspection markers like verbs, nouns and adjectives pertaining the semantic spheres of mental, intellectual and emotional manifestations, reference to the character’s inner world makes the writer resort on a larger scale to figures of speech and conceptual metaphors. Introspection can be viewed as a text category in its own right as it performs functions of its own and has a peculiar set of cognitive and language means to represent it in the text.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Oksana Fedotova
PY  - 2018/07
DA  - 2018/07
TI  - Introspection of Characters in Fiction: Cultural Aspect
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Arts, Design and Contemporary Education (ICADCE 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 102
EP  - 107
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icadce-18.2018.20
DO  - 10.2991/icadce-18.2018.20
ID  - Fedotova2018/07
ER  -