Mind-modelling literary personas

Abstract This article takes its cue from David Miall’s influential 2011 paper, ‘Enacting the other: towards an aesthetics of feeling in literary reading’, in Elisabeth Schellekens and Peter Goldie (eds) The Aesthetic Mind: Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 285–298. There, Miall considers the workings of readerly empathy with fictional people. He draws on work from philosophy, psychology, cognitive poetics, and both empirical and textual analysis to explore the complexities of how real readerly minds interact with fictional minds and the minds of real but remote authors. In this article, I revisit these arguments with the benefit of recent insights into the cognition of fictional minds. The key mechanism underlying characterisation, empathy, hostility, and engagement, I argue, is mind-modelling. With its origins in Theory of Mind, but extrapolated far from that simple phenomenon, mind-modelling captures the aesthetic and ethical relationships between minds both fictional and natural. I consider literary reading as a broader ecosystem: the reading mind as being embodied, enacted, and extended to include the imagined authorial mind. In recognition of Miall’s literary critical work, I will present a particular example from the poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats – not only for the analytical demonstration but also in order to show the echoes between Romantic notions of holistic engagement with nature and recent work in cognition and literature. The analysis suggests a solution to a literary critical debate around its ending. An approach situated in mind-modelling offers a principled exploration of both fictional, poetic minds as well as authorial positioning.