Readers’ Temperaments and Fictional Character

“Readers’ Temperaments and Fictional Character” advocates reviving study of ordinary readers’ variable responses to fictional characters to change the direction of theorizing about character. Admitting the wide range of possible responses to fictional characters limits the governing authority of texts over their denizens and writers over their humanlike creations, I argue here that human temperaments shape reading experiences more markedly than fiction-reading shapes people’s temperaments. The essay concludes with considerations of a revised pedagogy that opens up to the divergent responses predicted by a theory of temperamental character, mediating formalist and subjectivist practices by means of exercises based on Baruch Hochman’s cognitive theory of fictional character.