ception of persons (Cognitive Narratology). However, even though there is now a consensus on some aspects of character in narrative, many other aspects continue to be treated disparately.or words have long been regarded as fictive people. To understand characters, readers tend to resort to their knowledge about real people. In this framework, an anthropological, biological or psychological theory of persons can also be used in character analysis, as in Freuds analysis of Hamlet where he claims I have here translated into consciousness what had to remain unconscious in the mind of the hero (Freud, 1950) .school of thought pictured character as mere words or a paradigm of traits described by words. A well-known example of this approach is Barthess (1970) in which one of the codes, voices, substitutes for person, understood as the web of semes attached to a proper name. In this view, a character is not to be taken for anything like a person, yet on closer examination these semes correspond to traditional character traits. Although he differs from Barthes in many regards, Lotman (1970), in a similar vein, describes character as a sum of all binary oppositions to the other characters in a text which, together, constitute a paradigm. A character thus forms part of a constellation of characters who either share a set of common traits (parallels) or represent opposing traits (contrasts) .was not the first attack against a mimetic understanding of character during the last century, a comparable approach to character having already been advocated by the New Criticism. Wellek amp; Warren (1949) claimed that a character consists only of the words by which it is described or into whose mouth they are put by the author. Knights (1933) had earlier ridiculed the tendency in British criticism to treat character presentations like the representations of people with the question How many Children had Lady Macbeth? Despite this criticism, the reduction of characters to words was not convincing, for it posed many practical problems in literary criticism and also seemed to some critics unsatisfactory for theoretical reasons. Hochman (1985), for example, defended the idea of ??character as human-like against structuralist and post-structuralist conceptions with moral and aesthetic arguments.this situation, the series of essays by Margolin, by combining elements of structuralism, reception theory and the theory of fictional worlds, proved to be a breakthrough. For Margolin (1983), characters are first and foremost elements of the constructed narrative world: character, he claims, is a general semiotic element, independent of any particular verbal expression and ontologically different from it (7). He further points out that characters can have various modes of existence in storyworlds: they can be factual, counterfactual, hypothetical, conditional, or purely subjective (1995). Also taken up are questions such as how characters come into existence and what constitutes their identity (Identity and Narration), especially in storyworlds as a transtextual concept., Especially those with roots in analytical philosophy, have discussed the special ontological status of character under the label of incompleteness of characters. Unlike persons who exist in the real world and are complete, we can speak meaningfully only about those aspects of characters which have been described in the text or which are implied by it. Consequently, descriptions of characters have gaps, and often the missing information can not be inferred from the given information. In contrast to the description of real persons in which a gap may appear even though it is assumed that the person is complete, characters have gaps if the description does not supply the necessary information (Eaton 1976; Crittenden 1982; Lamarque 2003) .though there is currently a broad consensus that character can best be described as an entity forming part of the storyworld, the ontological status of this world and its entities remains unclear. Narratological theory presently offers three approaches to addressing this problem: drawing on the theory of possible worlds, the storyworld is seen as an independent realm created by the text (Margolin, 1990); from the perspective of cognitive theories of the reading process, character is seen as a mental model created by an empirical reader (Schneider, 2001); from the perspective of the neo-hermeneutical theory of literary communication, the text is an intentional object and character is a mental model created by an hypothetical historical model reader. This approach incorporates a number of insights into text processing, but focuses on the text (Jannidis, 2004). The main differences between these approaches lie in how the presentation of character is described and in the use of principles borrowed from the cognitive sciences.and actionof the oldest theoretical statements on character reflects on the relation of character...
