Book review: Dixon &Bortolussi (2024). The Analogical Reader

What is it about?

This is a book review of: Peter Dixon & Marisa Bortolussi (2024): The Analogical Reader: A Cognitive Approach to Literary Perspective Taking. Cambridge UP. The key issue in the monograph under review is the important question how readers of fiction manage to “take the perspective” of fictional characters in novels and short stories -- but by extension also in film, comics, and narratives in other artistic media. The authors' central claim is that if readers successfully engage with fictional characters, they do so by drawing on memories from their own, personal lives. That is: when confronted with something a fictional character says, or does, or experiences, the reader supposedly looks for an analogy in his or her personal life to make sense of that character. I am not convinced. In my view readers, particularly experienced readers, approach fictional characters and the worlds they inhabit in the spirit of Samuel Coleridge's “willing suspension of disbelief” and William Blake's “Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth” (from: Proverbs of Hell). Broad-minded readers happily accept the writer's invitation: “Come and enter the world I created, with fictional inhabitants who may be very different from you. Enjoy the experience!” So for me the key of perspective-taking is something that Dixon and Bortolussi only acknowledge in passing: “One of the traits of good literature is that it allows us to adopt the perspective of characters whose existential traits are very dissimilar to our own” (p. 32).

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Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash

Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash