haracterization, such subverting the first conception of this character aracters as entities of a storyworld does not imply that they are self-contained. On the contrary, the storyworld is constructed during the process of narrative communication, and characters thus form a part of the signifying structures which motivate and determine the narrative communication. Characters also play a role in thematic, symbolic or other constellations of the text and of the storyworld.most readers, characters are one of the most important aspects of a narrative. How readers relate to a character is a matter of empirical analysis, but it is important to bear in mind that the way the text presents a character is highly influential on the relation between character and reader. Three factors in particular are relevant in this regard: transfer of perspective;
the reader s affective predisposition toward the character? itself influenced by: character s emotions, whether explicitly described or implicitly conveyed; reader s reaction to her mental simulation of the character s position; expression of emotions in the presentation.
. evaluation of characters in the text.has always been a need to categorize characters in order to facilitate description and analysis. However, most proposals seem to be either too complex or theoretically unsatisfying, so that Forster s classification into flat vs. round characters continues to be widely used. No one has succeeded in constructing a complete and coherent theory of character. This difficulty, one suspects, is largely due to the human aspect of characterisation. By definition, the word character designates a human or human-like individual, and as such, the concept is less amenable to a formulaic or mechanical approach.
The difficulty in arriving at a complete and coherent theory of character or characterization is thus connected to the equivocation of the term character with regard torelationship to human beings; question of whether it exists only within the text, or have a relationship with entities outside the text.
These considerations can be described as ontological, as they touch on the origins of characters. The uncertainty in the ontology of characters may affect ones methodology in character analysis: should characters, for example, be compared with actual human beings, or should we restrict ourselves to the text, and not bother about the comparison? In this regard, we have an author like, who is of the view that stories and the people in them are made of words (Leitch, 1986) .On the other hand, a prominent tendency in pre - 20th century research on character attempts to look for prior reasons for a characters behaviour, even if these reasons are not found in the story itself.of character may also change through history. Notions of characterization may not even exist in certain periods in the development of literary criticism. The conception of character as we know it today, for example, did not exist in Aristotle. However, whether character or characterisation exist at all in Aristotle is a moot point, with some scholars arguing that the conception of character exist in his Poetics, but it is not as important as plot lt;http://exchange.nus.edu.sg/exchweb/bin/auth/owalogon.asp?url=http://exchange.nus.edu.sg/exchange/amp;reason=1gt;. In more recent years, the death of character has been proclaimed by, for example, in his Structuralist Poetics (1975: 230): to Culler, the notion of character is a myth.in spite of the problems or negative tendencies noted above, the concept of character can not be neglected in narrative analysis.continues to be important in certain genres of narrative, especially with regard to certain types of fiction, such as realistic fiction, and in relation to the evaluation of narrative. With reference to the second point above, W.J. Harvey (1986), for example, has noted that most great novels exist to reveal and explore character (1965).
of the concept and its study
recently, there was nothing like a coherent field of research for the concept of character, but only a loose set of notions related to it touching on such issues as the ontological status of characters, the kind of knowledge necessary to understand characters, the relation between character and action, the naming of characters, characterization as process and result, the relation of the reader to a character centering around the notions of identification and empathy, etc. The situation has changed over the past ten or fifteen years thanks to a series of monographs on character by Culpeper (2001), Eder (2008), Jannidis (2004), Koch (1992), Palmer (2004), and Schneider (2001) , all of which are indebted to the ground-breaking work done by Margolin in the 1980s and 1990s. Most of these studies draw on the cognitive sciences and their models of text processing and per...
