ABSTRACT
This chapter initially focuses on the mimetic dimension of characters, approaching and interpreting them as (primarily) fictional individuals structurally resembling actual persons within our real world. Such a perspective on characters implies the question of how audiences are able to recognize a character, and what separates them from other elements of fictional texts that represent a story or a storyworld. In order to address this, the chapter first outlines some fundamental assumptions from cognitive sciences and anthropology to give a clearer picture of how the subjective consciousness of someone different from ourselves is constituted in media representations where it forms the core of character recognition. The chapter then describes in more detail how media texts enable and instruct audiences to (re)identify such continuous consciousness frames and how to maintain them, before introducing some basic narratological vocabulary to describe in more detail how media texts grant different sorts of access to represented, subjective minds. Finally, it investigates different emotional stances of audiences toward characters, their worldviews, and their values. The chapter then discusses how to analyze these essentially subjective issues intersubjectively and why, anticipating that there are ultimately social, political, and ideological issues at stake in any character discussion.
