‘Phantasmal Intersubjectivity: Co-Presence and the Emersivity of Literary Characters’

The article proposes a theory of what it calls ‘emersivity’, or the permanence of fictional characters in readers’ lives once they have finished reading books. Reflecting on empirical data from a study of four hundred readers of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the article provides a model and a theoretical framework to account for readers’ reporting how fictional characters “stay with them” after readerly immersion (i.e., “experiential crossing”). To date, cognitive literary theories of immersion have focused exclusively on the other direction of transit: namely, how our real past experiences can sustain or enhance our experience of a literary narrative. By contrast, how fictional elements from a storyworld can surface or transmigrate into real-­life cognition has been basically ignored. The emersivity of fictional characters is intriguing and complex because it raises important issues regarding the possibility of entertaining in the real world intersubjective relations with non-­ actual beings, or what the article calls phantasmal intersubjectivity. The article concludes by claiming that the emersivity of literary characters can provide further empirical and theoretical ground to support claims about the impact of literary narratives in everyday life. It also argues for the relevance of emersivity to the broader study of permeability between imaginative and real worlds in human consciousness.