Secondary storyworld possible selves: narrative response and cultural (un)predictability

Abstract

Narrative experiencers frequently report broadly differing narrative responses. Literary scholarship customarily addresses those shared by communities of readers as pertaining to implied and rhetorical readers. However, empirical reader-response research shows that flesh-and-blood readers and audience members often show idiosyncratic narrative responses based on individual experience. Storyworld Possible Selves Theory (Martínez 2014. Storyworld possible selves and the phenomenon of narrative immersion: Testing a new theoretical construct. Narrative 22(1). 110–131, 2018. Storyworld possible selves. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter) provides an analytical toolkit for the study of both culturally predictable and completely individual responses to narratives, drawing on the frameworks of cognitive narratology, cognitive linguistics, and social psychology. This study discusses the affordances and shortcomings of this framework when addressing the bearing of hegemonic cultural models on narrative response and introduces the concept of “secondary storyworld possible selves” to account for responses predictable in communities sharing non-hegemonic cultural models. This renders cultural (un)predictability as a graded category and facilitates its qualitative and quantitative exploration.